6 ms·

Why is the web so slow?

42 points by ssttoo 13y ago

brownbat 13y ago
Designers aren't the only ones with work to do. CDNs appear to be messing with performance in ways that aren't really transparent to users or content providers.[1] We need better tools than speedtest sites. We need a way to see an ISP's provision of popular sites over time.[2] Or just encrypt everything and bounce it through proxies or route anonymizers, make that standard. Either way. [1] http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/how-to-stop-youtube-sucking-windows-guide/ http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/how-to-stop-youtube-sucking-wi... ; http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/13kmvd/have_time_warner_internet_but_can_barely_stream/ http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/13kmvd/have_time... [2] http://www.youtube.com/my_speed http://www.youtube.com/my_speed may be an example worth following for Netflix, Vimeo.
- mikkelewis 13y ago
  Regarding [2]... https://www.evernote.com/shard/s74/sh/f033a734-455b-427a-90a2-1be92ac5c5b4/fbb4a3d57bc0b9d62a1b5dc184b4f4be https://www.evernote.com/shard/s74/sh/f033a734-455b-427a-90a... SF: Is there something that I'm missing that isn't shitty comcast? (And I'm not eligible for Webpass, though I can dream)
  - freeasinfree 13y ago
    MonkeyBrains
  - wooster 13y ago
    Comcast Business Class is pretty solid in SF (as opposed to their normal service, which I've also had and is terrible).
- cradle 13y ago
  | Or just encrypt everything and bounce it through proxies or route anonymizers Yep, that'll speed things up
  - nextw33k 13y ago
    Its not about speeding it up, its about finding a fair test, this would create a worst case delivery scenario which you know someone hasn't messed with. If you can optimise your applications under those conditions you know its going to be gravy for those without lots of hops. The problem is that developers have very fast computers AND are usually a very short hop count from their deployment servers. They make really bad testers.
pebcak 13y ago
PEBKAC
HNLogInsSuckAss 13y ago
Because people think it can carry ever human communication in the world, simultaneously. It's being abused with such things as Netflix.
cclogg 13y ago
This should apply to games too lol. I hope one day we can rid the world of the 'load screen'! Perhaps with more SSDs and developers putting effort into streaming (both from net and hard-drive), it'll be possible ;)
- spoiler 13y ago
  I'm hardly an expert on games, but I think I hardly think streaming from the hard drive would a big improvement. You would (at best) see stuff partially loaded, or there would have to be some generic replacement (assuming it's a 3D game) for textures, meshes and what not. This would prove to be just as annoying, if not more so.
  - babebridou 13y ago
    The key is the pacing of the asset streaming relative to the rate of environmental change the player is creating on the screen. Streaming essentially disables fast travelling and teleporting to some extent, but makes slow travelling seamless and much, much more enjoyable. World of Warcraft was among the first online games to get it about right at launch, and I'm pretty sure the absence of loading screens was a huge factor in its universal acclaim.
    - alsocasey 13y ago
      A more recent example would be Diablo 3. There the absence of load screens and on-demand asset loading resulted in performance problems which persist to this day. I believe they're even considering re-introducing loading screens in the expansion.
- masklinn 13y ago
  I'm not hopeful, thing have generally been going in the other direction over time.
chavesn 13y ago
I believe this is one of the most, if not the most, under-appreciated "features" of websites and software (all types, including games). It directly affects usability and therefore user engagement. And that means it directly affects the bottom line for most companies. But most companies fail to see or ever really do anything about it.
pubby 13y ago
I have a feeling that most of those searches could be answered by, "It's because you're on an unreliable internet connection".
- 10098 13y ago
  Yes, but the fact that most websites these days have to load seven dozen javascripts and CSS stylesheets to become usable probably doesn't help either
  - throwaway2048 13y ago
    the real killer here is scripts that load scripts, often several layers deep, and a blocking load and a round trip each time....
    - jmpe 13y ago
      Google groups comes to mind. It's not uncommon to have to wait several seconds before you can read the text, and then it all collapses and you need to fish for the right post.
  - josteink 13y ago
    Add to that Webkit's retarded decision not to render any text at all if the web-page uses custom fonts. The reasoning behind this is a wish to avoid annoying or "unestethical" flicker from one font to another once the font has loaded. That's great if you're on 10mbps or more. Now put yourself on a 64kbps barely functioning link on the metro, you have DLed the 800bytes of article text you really want read 5 minutes ago but you're still waiting for that one special font which webkit requires to be able to see anything. And that wont fully load until you're off the metro. I tell you: Lesser things can drive a otherwise reasonable person completely mad. Don't use custom fonts on any mobile stylesheet ever. Thanks.
- Joeri 13y ago
  Shouldn't we then build sites with that assumption in mind? For example, why is It that almost no site uses appcache, when it is a way of ensuring that resources are already local and the only network traffic is the truly essential part? Why do we care about retina imagery, when it is obvious that the majority of users get a worse experience as a consequence? Why have sites doubled in size in two years time without adding a meaningful percentage in content? These all point to an industry that lacks perspective on their user's actual user experience because they are sitting on a nice fiber line two hops from the server.
ojbyrne 13y ago
As a Canadian I notice as 2 consecutively ranked queries: "Why are Canadians so rude" "Why are Canadians so friendly" And I'm suddenly reminded of Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" segments. And my guess is that for the majority of these queries, it's because the person has 7 different toolbars loaded into IE. IE8 if we're lucky, but probably IE7. Maybe IE6. Plus they probably have a ton of autostart crap on their computer and don't know how to differentiate between "my computer is slow" and "the web is slow."
- Guillaume86 13y ago
  Add some torrents downloading/uploading continuously.
- vxxzy 13y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree! After spending half my career cleaning up malware, this seems to be the #1 reason for performance complaints.... That, and the fact many vendors pre-load crappy software to subsidise the cost of the PC... It is hell for the average everyday user. We here know better than to click on the numerous green ad 'Download Now' buttons that litter a single page.
rdtsc 13y ago
Latency is funny, it is so because: * It is additive. It is necessary for just one component in the chain to add latency (monitor refresh, uncompressing, a bad cable modem, a bad router in the path, overloaded server, bloated JS code in the page). It is very hard to remove (one can argue impossible, but I am thinking of a multi-path set up with redundant hardware or network connections) * Even though we can process teraflops per second on home GPU cards, our websites load about as a fast as they did 10 years ago. * Border-line imperceptible UI or audio latencies still lead to bad user experience. They might not even know why they don't like it but in an A/B test they would pick the faster more response one. This was the case with Android vs Apple up until not too long ago. Even tiny UI jerkiness is enough to annoy a large number of users. * OS and whole software stacks are usually designed for improved throughput not low latency processing. It takes tuning (proc and sys params) or even installing a special kernel to get better latency support for low level code. * More benchmarks also measure throughput more than latency. Software is often picked and compared based on throughput, latency is second citizen most often. In a sequential setup for example, the two are compliments of each other, the more requests per second, the lower the latency of each request. It is only in concurrent and parallel contexts when latency starts to behave widely different. Send 100 requests at the same time towards the server? What happens? Do 50 get processed in 1ms but the rest block for 25ms? * Low latency and liveliness has to be baked into the innards of the system/VM/framework. Depending on what is picked (and it often is picked based on throughput) a lot of time might end up being wasted fighting latency in a highly concurrent situation.
- dclowd9901 13y ago
  Your point about android v ios really hit home with me. People who have tried both often express to me that they enjoy ios far more than android, but can't really explain why. I, myself, appreciate the fluid 60fps experience, and generally on explaining that difference to them, a lightbulb goes off in their head, and they realize that does actually bother them as well, but they just didn't know it was something to be noted. In ui development, we recognize things like responsiveness and fluidity, and something as clearly different as 60fps v 30fps is conjures a very clear picture in our minds, but most people are not versed in such language.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
Block all advertising, tracking an analytics, and a considerable part of the web becomes much faster. The amount of worthless crap that comes with a simple web page where only a bit of text is relevant is staggering.
tagawa 13y ago
Because of incessant cryptocurrency price checking?
WD-42 13y ago
I'm pretty sure 95% of those searches are people googling "why is X so slow" when they are having connection issues, as opposed to wondering why in general a service is always so slow.
- croisillon 13y ago
  And those people never come back asking google "why is facebook so fast" or at least "back to normal". Obviously a search engine reflects more problems than good things.
fanssex 13y ago
tried "Why is my computer " or "Why is my car"? It's just some pattern picked up by the search engine. no thing is fast enough.
- phaer 13y ago
  Yes, it works even with "Why is my brain..." And maybe some things are fast enough, but nobody searches for "why is my computer fast enough" or "why is my brain too fast"
jawr 13y ago
Because: http://www.renesys.com/2013/11/mitm-internet-hijacking/ http://www.renesys.com/2013/11/mitm-internet-hijacking/
jokoon 13y ago
It's slow because it's text based. I think there could be advantages to switching to compiled html or any other open binary page format. It would be less flexible, but at least it would be less abused: no more pages and pages of CSS, weird js widgets, blurbs of html. Compressing html with gzip is not that much efficient either. I don't think it's a great idea, but in some case it would sort of force everyone to make content that is just lighter.
alan_cx 13y ago
How many people are going to google: "why is facebook so fast" ?
lazyjones 13y ago
Because some people use 1MB+ .png images to measure latency of involuntary testers (visitors)? (the OP contains: http://lognormal.net/boomerang/config.js http://lognormal.net/boomerang/config.js)

42 points by ssttoo 13y ago

Designers aren't the only ones with work to do. CDNs appear to be messing with performance in ways that aren't really transparent to users or content providers.[1] We need better tools than speedtest sites. We need a way to see an ISP's provision of popular sites over time.[2] Or just encrypt everything and bounce it through proxies or route anonymizers, make that standard. Either way. [1] http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/how-to-stop-youtube-sucking-windows-guide/ http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/how-to-stop-youtube-sucking-wi... ; http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/13kmvd/have_time_warner_internet_but_can_barely_stream/ http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/13kmvd/have_time... [2] http://www.youtube.com/my_speed http://www.youtube.com/my_speed may be an example worth following for Netflix, Vimeo.

mikkelewis 13y ago
Regarding [2]... https://www.evernote.com/shard/s74/sh/f033a734-455b-427a-90a2-1be92ac5c5b4/fbb4a3d57bc0b9d62a1b5dc184b4f4be https://www.evernote.com/shard/s74/sh/f033a734-455b-427a-90a... SF: Is there something that I'm missing that isn't shitty comcast? (And I'm not eligible for Webpass, though I can dream)
- freeasinfree 13y ago
  MonkeyBrains
- wooster 13y ago
  Comcast Business Class is pretty solid in SF (as opposed to their normal service, which I've also had and is terrible).
cradle 13y ago
| Or just encrypt everything and bounce it through proxies or route anonymizers Yep, that'll speed things up
- nextw33k 13y ago
  Its not about speeding it up, its about finding a fair test, this would create a worst case delivery scenario which you know someone hasn't messed with. If you can optimise your applications under those conditions you know its going to be gravy for those without lots of hops. The problem is that developers have very fast computers AND are usually a very short hop count from their deployment servers. They make really bad testers.

pebcak 13y ago

PEBKAC

HNLogInsSuckAss 13y ago

Because people think it can carry ever human communication in the world, simultaneously. It's being abused with such things as Netflix.

cclogg 13y ago

This should apply to games too lol. I hope one day we can rid the world of the 'load screen'! Perhaps with more SSDs and developers putting effort into streaming (both from net and hard-drive), it'll be possible ;)

spoiler 13y ago
I'm hardly an expert on games, but I think I hardly think streaming from the hard drive would a big improvement. You would (at best) see stuff partially loaded, or there would have to be some generic replacement (assuming it's a 3D game) for textures, meshes and what not. This would prove to be just as annoying, if not more so.
- babebridou 13y ago
  The key is the pacing of the asset streaming relative to the rate of environmental change the player is creating on the screen. Streaming essentially disables fast travelling and teleporting to some extent, but makes slow travelling seamless and much, much more enjoyable. World of Warcraft was among the first online games to get it about right at launch, and I'm pretty sure the absence of loading screens was a huge factor in its universal acclaim.
  - alsocasey 13y ago
    A more recent example would be Diablo 3. There the absence of load screens and on-demand asset loading resulted in performance problems which persist to this day. I believe they're even considering re-introducing loading screens in the expansion.
masklinn 13y ago
I'm not hopeful, thing have generally been going in the other direction over time.

chavesn 13y ago

I believe this is one of the most, if not the most, under-appreciated "features" of websites and software (all types, including games). It directly affects usability and therefore user engagement. And that means it directly affects the bottom line for most companies. But most companies fail to see or ever really do anything about it.

pubby 13y ago

I have a feeling that most of those searches could be answered by, "It's because you're on an unreliable internet connection".

10098 13y ago
Yes, but the fact that most websites these days have to load seven dozen javascripts and CSS stylesheets to become usable probably doesn't help either
- throwaway2048 13y ago
  the real killer here is scripts that load scripts, often several layers deep, and a blocking load and a round trip each time....
  - jmpe 13y ago
    Google groups comes to mind. It's not uncommon to have to wait several seconds before you can read the text, and then it all collapses and you need to fish for the right post.
- josteink 13y ago
  Add to that Webkit's retarded decision not to render any text at all if the web-page uses custom fonts. The reasoning behind this is a wish to avoid annoying or "unestethical" flicker from one font to another once the font has loaded. That's great if you're on 10mbps or more. Now put yourself on a 64kbps barely functioning link on the metro, you have DLed the 800bytes of article text you really want read 5 minutes ago but you're still waiting for that one special font which webkit requires to be able to see anything. And that wont fully load until you're off the metro. I tell you: Lesser things can drive a otherwise reasonable person completely mad. Don't use custom fonts on any mobile stylesheet ever. Thanks.
Joeri 13y ago
Shouldn't we then build sites with that assumption in mind? For example, why is It that almost no site uses appcache, when it is a way of ensuring that resources are already local and the only network traffic is the truly essential part? Why do we care about retina imagery, when it is obvious that the majority of users get a worse experience as a consequence? Why have sites doubled in size in two years time without adding a meaningful percentage in content? These all point to an industry that lacks perspective on their user's actual user experience because they are sitting on a nice fiber line two hops from the server.

ojbyrne 13y ago

As a Canadian I notice as 2 consecutively ranked queries: "Why are Canadians so rude" "Why are Canadians so friendly" And I'm suddenly reminded of Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" segments. And my guess is that for the majority of these queries, it's because the person has 7 different toolbars loaded into IE. IE8 if we're lucky, but probably IE7. Maybe IE6. Plus they probably have a ton of autostart crap on their computer and don't know how to differentiate between "my computer is slow" and "the web is slow."

Guillaume86 13y ago
Add some torrents downloading/uploading continuously.
vxxzy 13y ago
I wholeheartedly agree! After spending half my career cleaning up malware, this seems to be the #1 reason for performance complaints.... That, and the fact many vendors pre-load crappy software to subsidise the cost of the PC... It is hell for the average everyday user. We here know better than to click on the numerous green ad 'Download Now' buttons that litter a single page.

rdtsc 13y ago

Latency is funny, it is so because: * It is additive. It is necessary for just one component in the chain to add latency (monitor refresh, uncompressing, a bad cable modem, a bad router in the path, overloaded server, bloated JS code in the page). It is very hard to remove (one can argue impossible, but I am thinking of a multi-path set up with redundant hardware or network connections) * Even though we can process teraflops per second on home GPU cards, our websites load about as a fast as they did 10 years ago. * Border-line imperceptible UI or audio latencies still lead to bad user experience. They might not even know why they don't like it but in an A/B test they would pick the faster more response one. This was the case with Android vs Apple up until not too long ago. Even tiny UI jerkiness is enough to annoy a large number of users. * OS and whole software stacks are usually designed for improved throughput not low latency processing. It takes tuning (proc and sys params) or even installing a special kernel to get better latency support for low level code. * More benchmarks also measure throughput more than latency. Software is often picked and compared based on throughput, latency is second citizen most often. In a sequential setup for example, the two are compliments of each other, the more requests per second, the lower the latency of each request. It is only in concurrent and parallel contexts when latency starts to behave widely different. Send 100 requests at the same time towards the server? What happens? Do 50 get processed in 1ms but the rest block for 25ms? * Low latency and liveliness has to be baked into the innards of the system/VM/framework. Depending on what is picked (and it often is picked based on throughput) a lot of time might end up being wasted fighting latency in a highly concurrent situation.

dclowd9901 13y ago
Your point about android v ios really hit home with me. People who have tried both often express to me that they enjoy ios far more than android, but can't really explain why. I, myself, appreciate the fluid 60fps experience, and generally on explaining that difference to them, a lightbulb goes off in their head, and they realize that does actually bother them as well, but they just didn't know it was something to be noted. In ui development, we recognize things like responsiveness and fluidity, and something as clearly different as 60fps v 30fps is conjures a very clear picture in our minds, but most people are not versed in such language.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

Block all advertising, tracking an analytics, and a considerable part of the web becomes much faster. The amount of worthless crap that comes with a simple web page where only a bit of text is relevant is staggering.

tagawa 13y ago

Because of incessant cryptocurrency price checking?

WD-42 13y ago

I'm pretty sure 95% of those searches are people googling "why is X so slow" when they are having connection issues, as opposed to wondering why in general a service is always so slow.

croisillon 13y ago
And those people never come back asking google "why is facebook so fast" or at least "back to normal". Obviously a search engine reflects more problems than good things.

fanssex 13y ago

tried "Why is my computer " or "Why is my car"? It's just some pattern picked up by the search engine. no thing is fast enough.

phaer 13y ago
Yes, it works even with "Why is my brain..." And maybe some things are fast enough, but nobody searches for "why is my computer fast enough" or "why is my brain too fast"

jawr 13y ago

Because: http://www.renesys.com/2013/11/mitm-internet-hijacking/ http://www.renesys.com/2013/11/mitm-internet-hijacking/

jokoon 13y ago

It's slow because it's text based. I think there could be advantages to switching to compiled html or any other open binary page format. It would be less flexible, but at least it would be less abused: no more pages and pages of CSS, weird js widgets, blurbs of html. Compressing html with gzip is not that much efficient either. I don't think it's a great idea, but in some case it would sort of force everyone to make content that is just lighter.

alan_cx 13y ago

How many people are going to google: "why is facebook so fast" ?

lazyjones 13y ago

Because some people use 1MB+ .png images to measure latency of involuntary testers (visitors)? (the OP contains: http://lognormal.net/boomerang/config.js http://lognormal.net/boomerang/config.js)