6 ms·

While I appreciate (and agree with) the overall theme (Make your pages light, so people on < 10mbit/second links have access them, opening them up as a market t

While I appreciate (and agree with) the overall theme (Make your pages light, so people on < 10mbit/second links have access them, opening them up as a market to you - this works well for people on older GPRS/GSM links in the developing world) - I don't understand the math. Presuming there are parts of the world still stuck in 1997 analog modem technology, then 100 Kilobytes / 56.6 kilobits/second = 14 seconds. At two minutes, there are people out there with 6.6 kilobit links connecting to youtube? I suspect there might be a bit of hyperbole in this article as well, because, even if there were people connecting on ultra slow links, the average latency of those connections is likely to be be wiped out by the tens of millions of broadband links.

mamby 14y ago
No hyperbole, that's the truth. I'm an african and broadband is just a name! The net is faster but still very slow... Chris knows what he's saying :)
- ghshephard 14y ago
  Oh, I know that developing country links are slow - I just thought it was a stretch to suggest that they are connecting to youtube so frequently after the page went from 2MB to 100 kilobytes that they shifted the average latency up. It's okay though, sometimes a bit of hyperbole does a better job of getting the story across.
  - morpher 14y ago
    The article states that the lighter page was opt-in. Thus a bias towards people for whom the heavy page was unusable is not surprising.
  - shashashasha 14y ago
    I think they were talking about just a small opt-in % of Youtube traffic, and that that percentage had a higher average latency than the rest of Youtube (vs shifting Youtube's entire traffic average).
ShardPhoenix 14y ago
Perhaps there's a delay in doing those 14 different requests? My phone is very fast when downloading apps, but sometimes still takes a long time to load a page.
gwillen 14y ago
Most of the page-load delay tends to come from dropped packets and unnecessary round-trips, rather than from bandwidth limitations.
- mdonohue 14y ago
  So "page weight" isn't the issue then, contradicting the title. It's the pipeline depth of the page.
  - Retric 14y ago
    Dropped packets are directly related to "page weight" and get worse depending on latency. 400 round trips * 500ms latency is 3 min 20 seconds. This took 20 minutes to load 1 megabyte.
    - foobarian 14y ago
      In other words the bandwidth really is something like 6.6 kbps instead of the nominal rate. (Really, did anyone ever get the nominal 56k modem rate back in the day?)
      - masklinn 14y ago
        No.
      - keithpeter 14y ago
        Yes as it happens, pretty close. Unfortunately British Telecom had a policy of dropping data connections after 2 hours in those days...
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    Page weight is an issue generally, but particularly for people on mobile where there are often relatively low bandwidth caps before the insane fees kick in. Page "girth", the number of different parts of a page that need loading via separate requests, is often a more significant issue for performance, again particularly on mobile devices but this time because wireless connections tend to be less reliable and even a modest increase in dropped packets can really hit your effective page load time.
roopeshv 14y ago
single digit kbps is very common speed in some parts of the world, and you'd not think it's possible until you actually experience it personally. combine it with trying to multitask by loading multiple pages in browser, where by you are basically trying to share those single digit speeds among multiple pages.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  I'm curious - what part of the world has single digit kbps links to the internet? I spent a month all over Brazil, and, while it was painful trying to work from some areas near Belem - it was either 80kbits+/second on GPRS or no connectivity whatsoever.
  - cbs 14y ago
    I'm curious - what part of the world has single digit kbps links to the internet? Just off the top of my head, rural Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.
    - mosburger 14y ago
      Hey now - I live in Maine, I can't think of anywhere with single digit kbps internet! My in-laws live in the sticks, in a town w/ a population of 600, and even they have DSL.
      - amichal 14y ago
        ~10Kbps. Southern VT. 0.1 mile from a cable provider and 2 miles from 4G cell coverage. Live on the wrong road and you are out if luck. Solutions tried by people I know (all since 2005) * Satalite radio (helps with downlink but uplink is still via modem) * Pay $700/mo for 1.5mb commercial T1 (1.5MBps). Took the ISP 3 days to do the line engineering from the CO. * Long distance point to point wifi (@2.4GHz ~1mile and 800Mhz 10+ miles) * HAM radio packet networking. Slow but fun * Running 1/2 mile+ of Ethernet cable (with inline repeaters) through the woods and hoping no one messes with them * Combinationa of the above. Hisghspeed Internet access in rural/hilly areas is a major challange. We pay a few dollars every month on our phone bills as a special state tax to fund the ISPs to provide it. Have for years. still a problem.
toast0 14y ago
For small transfers, you're going to need to account for tcp slow start and latency instead of just dividing data size by bandwidth. You also need to include latency for DNS lookups. HTTP Keep-Alive and reducing domains referenced can help a lot here.
rtkwe 14y ago
It the page could download in one burst without any breaks the calculation would be correct. However those 14 requests aren't all run at once and end up triggering sequentially. It goes something like GET youtube.com, process reply, find other resources needed GET youtube.com's CSS, etc. etc. Combined with link delays, dropped packets, long round trip times and the like you get a much slower nominal bandwidth.
chacham15 14y ago
My 1997 analog modem connected to the internet at an average speed of 3.3 kbps.
- rglullis 14y ago
  Let me FTFY: 3.3KBps
Joeri 14y ago
On dialup (western europe) i used to get around 6 KB / s. Combine that with high latency (1 second roundtrips) and a slow machine and 2 minutes doesn't sound crazy to me for a 100 kb page. And ofcourse, nowadays if i'm on a train my phone will often downgrade to gprs speeds, and it feels like i'm back on dialup having to wait a minute for a page to load.

mamby 14y ago

No hyperbole, that's the truth. I'm an african and broadband is just a name! The net is faster but still very slow... Chris knows what he's saying :)

ghshephard 14y ago
Oh, I know that developing country links are slow - I just thought it was a stretch to suggest that they are connecting to youtube so frequently after the page went from 2MB to 100 kilobytes that they shifted the average latency up. It's okay though, sometimes a bit of hyperbole does a better job of getting the story across.
- morpher 14y ago
  The article states that the lighter page was opt-in. Thus a bias towards people for whom the heavy page was unusable is not surprising.
- shashashasha 14y ago
  I think they were talking about just a small opt-in % of Youtube traffic, and that that percentage had a higher average latency than the rest of Youtube (vs shifting Youtube's entire traffic average).

ShardPhoenix 14y ago

Perhaps there's a delay in doing those 14 different requests? My phone is very fast when downloading apps, but sometimes still takes a long time to load a page.

gwillen 14y ago

Most of the page-load delay tends to come from dropped packets and unnecessary round-trips, rather than from bandwidth limitations.

mdonohue 14y ago
So "page weight" isn't the issue then, contradicting the title. It's the pipeline depth of the page.
- Retric 14y ago
  Dropped packets are directly related to "page weight" and get worse depending on latency. 400 round trips * 500ms latency is 3 min 20 seconds. This took 20 minutes to load 1 megabyte.
  - foobarian 14y ago
    In other words the bandwidth really is something like 6.6 kbps instead of the nominal rate. (Really, did anyone ever get the nominal 56k modem rate back in the day?)
    - masklinn 14y ago
      No.
    - keithpeter 14y ago
      Yes as it happens, pretty close. Unfortunately British Telecom had a policy of dropping data connections after 2 hours in those days...
- Silhouette 14y ago
  Page weight is an issue generally, but particularly for people on mobile where there are often relatively low bandwidth caps before the insane fees kick in. Page "girth", the number of different parts of a page that need loading via separate requests, is often a more significant issue for performance, again particularly on mobile devices but this time because wireless connections tend to be less reliable and even a modest increase in dropped packets can really hit your effective page load time.

roopeshv 14y ago

single digit kbps is very common speed in some parts of the world, and you'd not think it's possible until you actually experience it personally. combine it with trying to multitask by loading multiple pages in browser, where by you are basically trying to share those single digit speeds among multiple pages.

ghshephard 14y ago
I'm curious - what part of the world has single digit kbps links to the internet? I spent a month all over Brazil, and, while it was painful trying to work from some areas near Belem - it was either 80kbits+/second on GPRS or no connectivity whatsoever.
- cbs 14y ago
  I'm curious - what part of the world has single digit kbps links to the internet? Just off the top of my head, rural Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.
  - mosburger 14y ago
    Hey now - I live in Maine, I can't think of anywhere with single digit kbps internet! My in-laws live in the sticks, in a town w/ a population of 600, and even they have DSL.
    - amichal 14y ago
      ~10Kbps. Southern VT. 0.1 mile from a cable provider and 2 miles from 4G cell coverage. Live on the wrong road and you are out if luck. Solutions tried by people I know (all since 2005) * Satalite radio (helps with downlink but uplink is still via modem) * Pay $700/mo for 1.5mb commercial T1 (1.5MBps). Took the ISP 3 days to do the line engineering from the CO. * Long distance point to point wifi (@2.4GHz ~1mile and 800Mhz 10+ miles) * HAM radio packet networking. Slow but fun * Running 1/2 mile+ of Ethernet cable (with inline repeaters) through the woods and hoping no one messes with them * Combinationa of the above. Hisghspeed Internet access in rural/hilly areas is a major challange. We pay a few dollars every month on our phone bills as a special state tax to fund the ISPs to provide it. Have for years. still a problem.

toast0 14y ago

For small transfers, you're going to need to account for tcp slow start and latency instead of just dividing data size by bandwidth. You also need to include latency for DNS lookups. HTTP Keep-Alive and reducing domains referenced can help a lot here.

rtkwe 14y ago

It the page could download in one burst without any breaks the calculation would be correct. However those 14 requests aren't all run at once and end up triggering sequentially. It goes something like GET youtube.com, process reply, find other resources needed GET youtube.com's CSS, etc. etc. Combined with link delays, dropped packets, long round trip times and the like you get a much slower nominal bandwidth.

chacham15 14y ago

My 1997 analog modem connected to the internet at an average speed of 3.3 kbps.

rglullis 14y ago
Let me FTFY: 3.3KBps

Joeri 14y ago

On dialup (western europe) i used to get around 6 KB / s. Combine that with high latency (1 second roundtrips) and a slow machine and 2 minutes doesn't sound crazy to me for a 100 kb page. And ofcourse, nowadays if i'm on a train my phone will often downgrade to gprs speeds, and it feels like i'm back on dialup having to wait a minute for a page to load.