6 ms·

A "few extra ms" is up to 3 roundtrips difference, that's easily noticeable by humans on cellular. For all the CPU optimisations we're doing, cutting out a 50m

A "few extra ms" is up to 3 roundtrips difference, that's easily noticeable by humans on cellular. For all the CPU optimisations we're doing, cutting out a 50ms roundtrip for establishing a HTTP connection feels like a great area to optimize performance.

TheRealPomax 2y ago
And yet, compared to the time you're waiting for that mast head jpeg to load, plus an even bigger "react app bundle", also completely irrelevant. HTTP/3 makes a meaningful difference for machines that need to work with HTTP endpoints, which is what Google needed it for: it will save them (and any other web based system similar to theirs) tons of time and bandwidth, which at their scale directly translates to dollars saved. But it makes no overall difference to individual humans who are loading a web page or web app. There's a good argument to be made about wasting round trips and HTTP/3 adoption fixing that, but it's not grounded in the human experience, because the human experience isn't going to notice it and go "...did something change? everything feels so much faster now".
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- celsoazevedo 2y ago
  Almost every optimization is irrelevant if we apply the same reasoning to everything. Add all savings together and it does make a difference to real people using the web in the real world.
  - TheRealPomax 2y ago
    What a bizarre thing to say: not every optimization is imperceptable by humans (jpg, gzip, brotli, JS and CSS payload bundling and minification, etc. etc.) and not all sums of optimizations add up to "something significant in terms of human perception". HTTP/3 is a good optimization, and you can't sell it based on "it improves things for humans" because it doesn't. It improves things for machines, and given that essentially all internet traffic these days is handled by large scale machine systems, that's a perfectly sufficient reason for adoption.
    - celsoazevedo 2y ago
      For a long time all my internet connections were bad (slow, unstable or both). Compressing HTML/CSS/JS, avoiding JS unless absolutely needed, being careful with image sizes and formats, etc, helped a lot... so I guess this makes me biased. Today I have fibre at home, but mobile networks are still patchy. I'm talking sub 1Mbps and high ping/jitter sometimes. So you can see why I think an "irrelevant" optimisation that removes 300ms from a page reload, no compression vs brotli/zstd, jpg vs avif, etc, are important for me, a human. It's important to keep in mind that many users out there don't have a fast and low latency connections, at least not all the time. What takes 300ms to complete on our fast machine and fast WiFi at the office might take 1s on someone else's device and connection. It's harder to understand this if we only use fast connections/hardware though.
      - TheRealPomax 2y ago
        That was my point: 300ms sounds like a lot until, like me too, you're on a slow connection and those 300ms on the entire 10 second page load are utterly irrelevant. You were already expecting a several second load time, that 300ms is not something that even registers: the HTTP negotiation on a modern page is _not_ what you're noticing on a slow connection. You're noticing literally everything else taking forever instead.
        adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
        3% speedup is still pretty good. (especially because with some of the awfulness, it's possible to get bottle-necked by multiple of these in which case it could be 6 or 9%)
        TheRealPomax 2y ago
        omfg: YES! YES IT IS! But you won't notice it and so the argument that it improves the experience is nonsense because you as human WON'T NOTICE THOSE 3 OR EVEN 6% It's good because it speeds up the overall response by a measurable degree, not because it makes the experience better. That only happens in conjunction with tons of other improvements, the big ones of which are completely unrelated to the protocol itself and are instead related to how the page is programmed. How is everyone this bad are understanding that if someone claims A cannot be justified because of B, that does not mean that A cannot be justified. It's near-trivially justified in this case. This crowd really should know better.
  - SkyPuncher 2y ago
    In my experience almost every optimization is irrelevant for that exact reasoning. Nearly all of my real world performance issues have come from a very small set of functionality running extremely poorly.
  - waynesonfire 2y ago
    Google operates at such a scale that tiny increases of performances allows them to support a team of engineers and saves money on the bottom line. For example, Google hires 10 engineers, they deploy HTTP/3, it saves 0.5% cpu usage, Google saves a million dollars and covers the salary of the said 10 engineers. For the vast majority of society, the savings don't matter. Perhaps even deploying it is a net-negative with a ROI of decades. Or, the incentives can be misaligned leading to exploitation of personal information. For example, see chrome manifest v3. It's okay to question whether we need it.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      It absolutely matters. Machines are orders of magnitude faster than they were 20 years ago; most software isn't doing much more than software did 20 years ago. And no, collaborative editing isn't be-all, end-all, nor does it explain where all that performance is lost. Many optimizations have bad ROI because users' lives are an externality for the industry. It's Good and Professional to save some people-weeks in development, at the cost of burning people-centuries of your users' life in aggregate. And like with pollution, you usually can't pin the problem on anyone, as it's just a sum of great many parties each doing tiny damage.
      - pixl97 2y ago
        >most software isn't doing much more than software did 20 years ago This isn't exactly true, but some of the potential reasons are pretty bad. Software turning into an ad platform or otherwise spying on users has made numerous corporations wealthier than the gods at the expense of the user is probably one of the most common ones.
      - joshstrange 2y ago
        > Machines are orders of magnitude faster than they were 20 years ago; most software isn't doing much more than software did 20 years ago. That seems like an absurd statement to the point I wonder if I’m missing something.
- charleslmunger 2y ago
  Deploying QUIC led to substantial p95 and p99 latency improvements when I did it (admittedly a long time ago) in some widely used mobile apps. At first we had to correct our analysis for connection success rate because so many previously failing connections now succeeded slowly. It's a material benefit over networks with packet loss and/or high latency. An individual human trying to accomplish something in an elevator, parking garage, or crowded venue will care about a connection being faster with a greater likelihood of success.
- epolanski 2y ago
  > But it makes no overall difference to individual humans who are loading a web page or web app. Navigating from my phone at 4g and my fiber connection has drastic differences. Especially noticeable when on vacations or places with poor connections, TLS handshakes can take many, many, many, seconds..After the handshake and an established connection it's very different.
the8472 2y ago
Isn't 5G supposed to solve the mobile latency issue?
- nine_k 2y ago
  The connection to your local tower can have a negligible latency. The connection all the way to the datacenter may take longer. Then, there is congestion sometimes, e.g. around large gatherings of people; it manifests as latency, too.
  - the8472 2y ago
    But from the tower onward it shouldn't be any different from fixed internet connections, except for the gatherings, I'll grant that one. So then (modern) mobile shouldn't be all that special.
    - nine_k 2y ago
      At a previous job I had to specifically accommodate the backend API design to slow, large-latency 3G links which much of our East Asian audience had at the time. South Korea is one thing, Malaysia, quite another.
      - joshstrange 2y ago
        Could you talk a little bit more about what changes you made on the back into accommodate that? That sounds interesting.
    - kiwijamo 2y ago
      A lot of traffic still goes over 4G or even 3G in many countries. Most countries have only deployed 5G NSA (non-standalone) which means mobiles uses both 4G and 5G at the same time. Only a few networks in a few countries have deployed 5G SA (standalone) where mobiles use 5G only -- and even those few networks only deploy 5G SA in certain places e.g. selected CBDs. I live in the largest city in my country and I only get 4G still in my suburb and much of rest of my city is 5G NSA which means in most places phones stil use 4G for uplink and a mix of 4G and 5G for the downlink. Hence there is still a long way to go until most traffic (in both directions -- i.e. uplink AND downlink) is over 5G.
motorest 2y ago
> A "few extra ms" is up to 3 roundtrips difference, that's easily noticeable by humans on cellular. That's a valid concern. That's the baseline already though, so everyone is already living with that without much in the way of a concern. It's a nice-to-have. The problem OP presents is what are the tradeoffs for that nice-to-have. Is security holes an acceptable tradeoff?
- fragmede 2y ago
  Most people still use Google, and so they're living the fast HTTP 3 life, switching off that to a slower protocol only when interacting with non-Google/Amazon/MSFT properties. If your product is a competitor, but slower/inaccessible users are going to bounce off your product and not even be able to tell you why.
  - sublimefire 2y ago
    Nonsense, most of the web is non Google, Amazon or MSFT. Much of the web apps already uses CDNs which will enable web3 and the browser will support it. Other parts like APIs will not benefit much it they hit the database/auth/etc. MSFT stuff is dead slow anyway, Amazon is out of date, Google is just ads (who uses their search anymore?)
    - fragmede 2y ago
      > most of the web is non Google, Amazon or MSFT. maybe you can point out where that's what I said
  - kiwijamo 2y ago
    MSFT provides some of the slowest experiences I've had e.g. SharePoint, Teams, etc. Am laughing at the assumption that non-MSFT/etc properties are seen as slower when it is i fact MSFT that are the slowpokes. I haven't used Google much lately but they can be pretty poor too. AWS are pretty good though. However it is notable I get good speeds and latency using S3 over HTTP/1.1 for backing up several hundreds gigs of data, so not sure if HTTP/3 makes any difference if it is already good enough without.
croes 2y ago
And then the web app eats all that saved ms with ease.
guappa 2y ago
Does it really matter? The website is first going to download 5mb of js, then it's going to show 3 popups.

TheRealPomax 2y ago

And yet, compared to the time you're waiting for that mast head jpeg to load, plus an even bigger "react app bundle", also completely irrelevant. HTTP/3 makes a meaningful difference for machines that need to work with HTTP endpoints, which is what Google needed it for: it will save them (and any other web based system similar to theirs) tons of time and bandwidth, which at their scale directly translates to dollars saved. But it makes no overall difference to individual humans who are loading a web page or web app. There's a good argument to be made about wasting round trips and HTTP/3 adoption fixing that, but it's not grounded in the human experience, because the human experience isn't going to notice it and go "...did something change? everything feels so much faster now".

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
celsoazevedo 2y ago
Almost every optimization is irrelevant if we apply the same reasoning to everything. Add all savings together and it does make a difference to real people using the web in the real world.
- TheRealPomax 2y ago
  What a bizarre thing to say: not every optimization is imperceptable by humans (jpg, gzip, brotli, JS and CSS payload bundling and minification, etc. etc.) and not all sums of optimizations add up to "something significant in terms of human perception". HTTP/3 is a good optimization, and you can't sell it based on "it improves things for humans" because it doesn't. It improves things for machines, and given that essentially all internet traffic these days is handled by large scale machine systems, that's a perfectly sufficient reason for adoption.
  - celsoazevedo 2y ago
    For a long time all my internet connections were bad (slow, unstable or both). Compressing HTML/CSS/JS, avoiding JS unless absolutely needed, being careful with image sizes and formats, etc, helped a lot... so I guess this makes me biased. Today I have fibre at home, but mobile networks are still patchy. I'm talking sub 1Mbps and high ping/jitter sometimes. So you can see why I think an "irrelevant" optimisation that removes 300ms from a page reload, no compression vs brotli/zstd, jpg vs avif, etc, are important for me, a human. It's important to keep in mind that many users out there don't have a fast and low latency connections, at least not all the time. What takes 300ms to complete on our fast machine and fast WiFi at the office might take 1s on someone else's device and connection. It's harder to understand this if we only use fast connections/hardware though.
    - TheRealPomax 2y ago
      That was my point: 300ms sounds like a lot until, like me too, you're on a slow connection and those 300ms on the entire 10 second page load are utterly irrelevant. You were already expecting a several second load time, that 300ms is not something that even registers: the HTTP negotiation on a modern page is _not_ what you're noticing on a slow connection. You're noticing literally everything else taking forever instead.
      - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
        3% speedup is still pretty good. (especially because with some of the awfulness, it's possible to get bottle-necked by multiple of these in which case it could be 6 or 9%)
        TheRealPomax 2y ago
        omfg: YES! YES IT IS! But you won't notice it and so the argument that it improves the experience is nonsense because you as human WON'T NOTICE THOSE 3 OR EVEN 6% It's good because it speeds up the overall response by a measurable degree, not because it makes the experience better. That only happens in conjunction with tons of other improvements, the big ones of which are completely unrelated to the protocol itself and are instead related to how the page is programmed. How is everyone this bad are understanding that if someone claims A cannot be justified because of B, that does not mean that A cannot be justified. It's near-trivially justified in this case. This crowd really should know better.
- SkyPuncher 2y ago
  In my experience almost every optimization is irrelevant for that exact reasoning. Nearly all of my real world performance issues have come from a very small set of functionality running extremely poorly.
- waynesonfire 2y ago
  Google operates at such a scale that tiny increases of performances allows them to support a team of engineers and saves money on the bottom line. For example, Google hires 10 engineers, they deploy HTTP/3, it saves 0.5% cpu usage, Google saves a million dollars and covers the salary of the said 10 engineers. For the vast majority of society, the savings don't matter. Perhaps even deploying it is a net-negative with a ROI of decades. Or, the incentives can be misaligned leading to exploitation of personal information. For example, see chrome manifest v3. It's okay to question whether we need it.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    It absolutely matters. Machines are orders of magnitude faster than they were 20 years ago; most software isn't doing much more than software did 20 years ago. And no, collaborative editing isn't be-all, end-all, nor does it explain where all that performance is lost. Many optimizations have bad ROI because users' lives are an externality for the industry. It's Good and Professional to save some people-weeks in development, at the cost of burning people-centuries of your users' life in aggregate. And like with pollution, you usually can't pin the problem on anyone, as it's just a sum of great many parties each doing tiny damage.
    - pixl97 2y ago
      >most software isn't doing much more than software did 20 years ago This isn't exactly true, but some of the potential reasons are pretty bad. Software turning into an ad platform or otherwise spying on users has made numerous corporations wealthier than the gods at the expense of the user is probably one of the most common ones.
    - joshstrange 2y ago
      > Machines are orders of magnitude faster than they were 20 years ago; most software isn't doing much more than software did 20 years ago. That seems like an absurd statement to the point I wonder if I’m missing something.
charleslmunger 2y ago
Deploying QUIC led to substantial p95 and p99 latency improvements when I did it (admittedly a long time ago) in some widely used mobile apps. At first we had to correct our analysis for connection success rate because so many previously failing connections now succeeded slowly. It's a material benefit over networks with packet loss and/or high latency. An individual human trying to accomplish something in an elevator, parking garage, or crowded venue will care about a connection being faster with a greater likelihood of success.
epolanski 2y ago
> But it makes no overall difference to individual humans who are loading a web page or web app. Navigating from my phone at 4g and my fiber connection has drastic differences. Especially noticeable when on vacations or places with poor connections, TLS handshakes can take many, many, many, seconds..After the handshake and an established connection it's very different.

the8472 2y ago

Isn't 5G supposed to solve the mobile latency issue?

nine_k 2y ago
The connection to your local tower can have a negligible latency. The connection all the way to the datacenter may take longer. Then, there is congestion sometimes, e.g. around large gatherings of people; it manifests as latency, too.
- the8472 2y ago
  But from the tower onward it shouldn't be any different from fixed internet connections, except for the gatherings, I'll grant that one. So then (modern) mobile shouldn't be all that special.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    At a previous job I had to specifically accommodate the backend API design to slow, large-latency 3G links which much of our East Asian audience had at the time. South Korea is one thing, Malaysia, quite another.
    - joshstrange 2y ago
      Could you talk a little bit more about what changes you made on the back into accommodate that? That sounds interesting.
  - kiwijamo 2y ago
    A lot of traffic still goes over 4G or even 3G in many countries. Most countries have only deployed 5G NSA (non-standalone) which means mobiles uses both 4G and 5G at the same time. Only a few networks in a few countries have deployed 5G SA (standalone) where mobiles use 5G only -- and even those few networks only deploy 5G SA in certain places e.g. selected CBDs. I live in the largest city in my country and I only get 4G still in my suburb and much of rest of my city is 5G NSA which means in most places phones stil use 4G for uplink and a mix of 4G and 5G for the downlink. Hence there is still a long way to go until most traffic (in both directions -- i.e. uplink AND downlink) is over 5G.

motorest 2y ago

> A "few extra ms" is up to 3 roundtrips difference, that's easily noticeable by humans on cellular. That's a valid concern. That's the baseline already though, so everyone is already living with that without much in the way of a concern. It's a nice-to-have. The problem OP presents is what are the tradeoffs for that nice-to-have. Is security holes an acceptable tradeoff?

fragmede 2y ago
Most people still use Google, and so they're living the fast HTTP 3 life, switching off that to a slower protocol only when interacting with non-Google/Amazon/MSFT properties. If your product is a competitor, but slower/inaccessible users are going to bounce off your product and not even be able to tell you why.
- sublimefire 2y ago
  Nonsense, most of the web is non Google, Amazon or MSFT. Much of the web apps already uses CDNs which will enable web3 and the browser will support it. Other parts like APIs will not benefit much it they hit the database/auth/etc. MSFT stuff is dead slow anyway, Amazon is out of date, Google is just ads (who uses their search anymore?)
  - fragmede 2y ago
    > most of the web is non Google, Amazon or MSFT. maybe you can point out where that's what I said
- kiwijamo 2y ago
  MSFT provides some of the slowest experiences I've had e.g. SharePoint, Teams, etc. Am laughing at the assumption that non-MSFT/etc properties are seen as slower when it is i fact MSFT that are the slowpokes. I haven't used Google much lately but they can be pretty poor too. AWS are pretty good though. However it is notable I get good speeds and latency using S3 over HTTP/1.1 for backing up several hundreds gigs of data, so not sure if HTTP/3 makes any difference if it is already good enough without.

croes 2y ago

And then the web app eats all that saved ms with ease.

guappa 2y ago

Does it really matter? The website is first going to download 5mb of js, then it's going to show 3 popups.