The faster the Internet becomes, the slower it loads pages

http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15523761

by doronba • 16 years ago

16 15 16 years ago

Latencies introduced by Advertising, are substantial IMO as well.

tedunangst• 16 years ago

Pretty inaccurate article I'd say. The general premise of "broadband is faster, but there's more to download" is close to right, and I'll agree that 8 seconds was about how long it took to load web pages back when, but it's a very rare page (other than HN itself, ironically) that takes more than about 3 seconds to load on even middling DSL.

And I have no idea why streaming video requires 60ms latency.

_delirium• 16 years ago

On my middling DSL (320 kbps symmetric) there's a lot of pages that take more than 3 seconds to load, especially if you're not using AdBlock. There are some Flash ads that take 5+ seconds to load just by themselves!

The typical for a large corporate site seems to be 4-6 sec for me. I just timed cnn.com and yahoo.com both at 5s total load time, and aol.com at 8s (all in Chrome on Linux).

edit: Found a new winner: foxnews.com consistently takes between 25 and 33 seconds to load.

mikeytown2• 16 years ago

foxnews just took me 8 seconds to load. All the JS took 1.42 seconds and flash took about a second as well; 3MB for everything. I have a fairly fast cable connection.

Tested in chrome 5.0 dev

doronba• 16 years ago

obviously its not a uniform experience, and there are problems with the article, but i do think it stands to reason that rich content, and in my mind especially Advertising, grind the experience which I recall was faster in many cases.

xiaoma• 16 years ago

On my middling ADSL (10M/2M), Fox takes about 4 seconds, but it's readable after 1 or 2. Not bad for being on the other side of the Pacific.

FF3.6, all plugins disabled.

MikeCapone• 16 years ago

"The future is beckoning. Netflix has just announced an on-demand video-streaming service offering full high-definition picture quality (so-called 1080p, which has 1,080 lines in its picture) with 5.1-channel surround sound. Each stream being watched will require a megabyte a second of bandwidth and a latency of less than 60ms if it is to deliver crisp, pin-sharp video and pristine sound."

Latency doesn't matter with video, afaik. This seems inaccurate.

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

Also, Netflix clarified that they aren't doing 1080p this year: http://mashable.com/2010/02/08/netflix-1080p/

jcnnghm• 16 years ago

People like this shouldn't be writing technical articles.

A 700ms ping would be indicative of severe network problems, especially at that distance. The author is probably experiencing packet loss. Realistic ping times across the country are usually 100ms or so. I can ping most major websites in under 20ms.

DNS can indeed be a bottleneck, but it usually isn't. It's a fairly basic service, and if it's really a problem it's simple stupid to switch to a free provider like google.

Streaming video is not dependent on latency, only throughput.

Dark fiber won't necessarily help. The bottleneck is more realistically in the switching equipment. A single fiber can carry massive amounts of data.

donaq• 16 years ago

Not only that. It's really stupid to use IP addresses instead of domain names because, guess what, most sites share IPs these days.

endergen2• 16 years ago

I don't want faster as in more throughput, I want faster as in lower latency. Imagine if we could actually develop software that could depend on the internet being lower the 1/60th of a second. All the logic we have to do in games hide latency would go away. We would then be able to just pass back and forth input streams and have our simulations sync by exchanging them back and forth. Perhaps 1/120th would be ideal so that both parties feel a sub 1/60th of a second response time.

gridspy• 16 years ago

Lovely dream. It is unfortunate that it takes 130ms (10x as long as your dream) for a pulse of light to circumnavigate the world. Even if it was point to point, without switching or network delays, it would take up to 60ms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light

You can't remove the speed of light constraints, no matter how nice it would be.

endergen2• 16 years ago

Thanks for the reference. I appreciate it.

Locke1689• 16 years ago

There's a saying: bandwidth is money; latency is physics.

You can always get more bandwidth (more flow per second) through the pipes by just building more pipes. This isn't difficult, just expensive.

Reducing latency, however, is much harder. Eventually you still have to deal with a photon moving through fiber and an electron and a circuit.

greenlblue• 16 years ago

Funny how the article is talking about slow page loads and the page itself has a little advertising popup.

aw3c2• 16 years ago

I was going to say that. The web has become pretty fast once I disabled Javascript and uninstalled Flash. I don't miss anything on everyday browsing (= killing time or finding interesting things) nor on research. Highly recommended that you try it.

The faster the Internet becomes, the slower it loads pages

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