> That latency is experienced everywhere too. Don't confuse latency and bandwidth though. Most of those messages are relatively small, so they don't contribute

> That latency is experienced everywhere too. Don't confuse latency and bandwidth though. Most of those messages are relatively small, so they don't contribute to (network) latency almost at all. Plus gzip exists, further reducing the amount of data transmitted, thus both reducing latency and improving bandwidth utilisation. Also usually when it comes to cases where text would be actually a bottleneck (e.g. images, videos, audio, etc), binary formats are preferred and work very well, and generally you can tolerate e.g. images or audio being slightly broken, so you don't need to debug those formats too frequently. It's a nightmare do debug them though.