

Ask YC: Is Internet Slowing down? - tx

Normally I dislike <i>"Ask YC"</i> posts but I am genuinely curious about this one, so I decided to ask:<p>Is it just me, or just central Texas, but I have a feeling that Internet is slowing down. I work on various connections, from 1Mbit/sec to 9Mbit/sec and I am starting to notice that most web sites are getting slower.<p>When I got my first broadband in 2000, most sites would load instantly or nearly instantly. These days <i>everything</i> (except maybe google.com) takes 3-5 seconds to show up, regardless of my connection speed. "Flat" download speeds, i.e those of large files', remain fast though.<p>Has anyone else noticed this? If so, how would you explain it? Generally slower networks because of increased loads (video, torrents) or ISPs silently  introducing delays, or web sites running out of servers?<p>What kind of "cloud computing" are we talking about if we're spending more and more time in front of <i>loading...</i> banners? Even gmail, from a God of Scaling, has slowed down for me and isn't getting any better.<p>Add to that increasing number of ads, heavy flash content, and browsers that quickly swallow hundreds of megabytes of RAM and routinely block UI thread, and user experience is slowly drifting downhill.<p>Again, is it just me?
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staunch
You can easily check the speed of fetching an individual piece of content. I
check frequently on my projects that pages are served up fast (sub 200ms). In
general, it's as fast or faster than it ever has been. You can also test your
max theoretical throughput by running parallel GETs on the same piece of big
file content (using a "download accelerator").

I suspect you're confusing perceived speed with actual speed. The web is much
richer now (as you mentioned). Flash, Javascript, and CSS wreak havoc with
rendering time. Browsing the web with anything less than a ~2 year old
computer is going to feel a bit sluggish these days. Even with a modern
computer it's not going to be as fast as the largely static web of the old
days.

~~~
tx
Ok, here is a quick test. I am pretty sure none of us has any portion of cisco
site in our caches. Copy&paste this link into your browser and see how long it
takes for this page to _completely_ load. It has no flash, nothing complex: a
bit of text and a few images, very much like things used to be in the 90s:

<http://www.cisco.com/web/partners/index.html>

Takes about 4 seconds on my 4Mbit/sec connection with AMD X2 4400+ and 3GB of
RAM.

Want a true horror story? Check out <http://www.nick.com>

~~~
staunch
Loads completely in 2-3 seconds for me. I'm ~20ms away from www.cisco.com
(which is served out of San Jose for me). Anyway, that Cisco page actually
does contain javascript and CSS. Not a very 90's style page.

Here's a better test of a 90's style page that has a lot of content:
<http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html> This page loads almost instantly for me.

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LukeKrogh
I think 3-5 seconds for everything is a bit much.

However, I see where you're coming from. In the time frame that you mention I
too have noticed a drastic slow down. I would imagine it to be a combination
of:

A) The increasing amount of users online. This taxes EVERYTHING from the local
regional carriers to the main network backbones to the server hardware to the
already sketchy DNS system.

B) Websites not seeing the need to scale as a priority over adding new
features. Websites that grow very quickly seem to sometimes follow this trend.

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DaniFong
Bandwidth has been following something like Moore's law just about everywhere
except north america. It's been a while since I checked this, but back in 2004
(?) about 80% of the fiber laid wasn't even lit up here. [ref:
<http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail400.html> in one of the
questions]

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gibsonf1
Are you using the Firefox Beta? I've had serious problems with the beta on my
machine (to the extent of 100% cpu usage on a dual core when running a BIM
pacakage at the same time.) The internet is now a whole lot faster with
Safari, I must say (running on XP).

~~~
tx
No, I'm on FF 2.0 (Windows|Linux) and on Safari when I'm on a Mac. However,
FireFox, especially when paired with Flash, is a topic for another discussion:
my CPU utulization sometimes jumps to 100% when I simply switch tabs in it.

Actually I am finding more and more often that I DONT want to use a "web app",
but want a slick and fast desktop option instead, I started thinking that
almost immediately after I left Windows behind (Leopard or Ubuntu now)

~~~
gibsonf1
FF 2.0 was even worse for me with the extreme memory leak when using google
apps. Safari so far is blazing fast (on windows)

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herdrick
Some sites are still fast: <http://www.biographicon.com> And no, I don't think
it's your imagination.

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xirium
Your ISP may have a web cache which is creating high latency. Can you fetch
large files quickly? It the delay most noticably when fetching many small
files?

