4 ms·
You need to be on the edge, they say. Be close to your users. Minimize latency. How much of an issue is latency in practice? Here is an example. My book r
by mg 3y ago
You need to be on the edge, they say.
Be close to your users. Minimize latency.
How much of an issue is latency in practice?
Here is an example. My book recommendation project Gnooks, which I run on a server in Germany:
https://www.gnooks.com https://www.gnooks.com
Does it feel too slow for anybody?
Over the last years, I have gotten many thousands of suggestions from users on this project. Yet, as far as I can remember, nobody ever touched the topic of latency. While the largest group of users is from the USA.
- jtriangle 3y agoLike alot of old questions, it depends. The cool part is, you can test this reliably, and see if it matters. That'll get you a concrete answer.
- aragilar 3y agoAs an aussie, it's noticeable that it's not a fast local site (it could either be a slow local site or a fast overseas one), but that's to be expected (ping time is ~300ms FYI). IMHO your site is fine! It's if you're site is already slow then it's a problem.
- mg 3y agoInteresting. Thanks for the info. Would like to hear how it feels from Australia compared to other websites. Like Hacker News, Goodreads and Wikipedia for example.
- aragilar 3y agoThis HN page is feels faster (I did the clean refresh before doing the ping, to avoid bias): ping is ~185ms (so speed of light is likely the difference), Goodreads is similar to HN, ping ~236ms, Google(.com) feels fast, but not as fast as to could be (10 ms ping—not sure if I'm logged in makes a difference, and ABC our local public broadcaster's site abc.net.au does feel a bit faster with the same ping time, and is probably the fastest site you could reasonable have here), and Wikipedia home page is same as Goodreads (and same ping time as well). So I'd say you're not doing bad at all (the IPs that return pings are US-based apart from Google and ABC). This is all on a desktop on a decent (for AU residential) fully-wired connection though, so I suspect introducing some packet loss (e.g. on trains going through tunnels) would give more interesting results. Fun aside related to latency: I've sshed from France to Australia, modal editors are so much easier over those latencies, as you can effectively queue up commands and round-trip time leaves you with enough time to plan you next key strokes.
- mg 3y agoGreat. Thanks for the infos!
- swiftcoder 3y agoYour site keeps most of the logic on the backend, and only makes a single roundtrip to the server per user interaction - that makes you significantly less subject to latency problems than the trendy PWAs that implement most of their logic in the frontend (and then have to issue multiple queries to the backend to load the necessary data)
- everfrustrated 3y agoTry using a VPN from Australia to browse the internet. From Europe that would give you 2x the latency an Australian user would see which should help illustrate their worst experience.
- klabb3 3y agoFrom Hanoi, it’s better than I expected. Still 1s+ for initial DNS+TLS until page load. Subsequent are expectedly better, <1s at least.