<story><title>Why is the Internet so Slow?</title><url>https://blog.apnic.net/2017/06/19/why-is-the-internet-so-slow/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lagged2Death</author><text>&lt;i&gt;If the 3x slowdown from the infrastructure were eliminated, each round-trip-time being 3x faster would affect all the protocols above, and we could immediately cut the latency inflation from ~37x to around 10x, without any protocol modifications.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The page this article is published on makes 87 separate network requests to 19 different domains. Even with a great deal of the content cached, it takes 7 seconds to reload over my WiFi today. This is because I&amp;#x27;m using an ad blocker; without one, the page makes more requests to more domains and transfers more stuff, slower.&lt;p&gt;It seems likely that cutting bloat would have a much bigger impact on responsiveness than infrastructure upgrades. Cutting bloat would produce benefits even (especially) in times and places where signals or infrastructure are marginal. Cutting bloat could mean your old phone or tablet computer could browse the web tolerably instead of ending up in a landfill. Cutting bloat from a website today produces a benefit, for all visitors, worldwide, &lt;i&gt;today&lt;/i&gt;. Improving infrastructure may be a good investment, but cutting bloat is a force multiplier.&lt;p&gt;The responsiveness of the web has been adjusted to optimize the number of eyeballs that see ads. If a site is too sluggish, people leave, but a site that&amp;#x27;s too fast is leaving money on the table. How many advertising, tracking, and affiliate domains would a web page like this connect to, if latency were cut by two thirds?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>haldean</author><text>This took me a total of 5 minutes: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;static.haldean.org&amp;#x2F;why-is-the-internet-slow.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;static.haldean.org&amp;#x2F;why-is-the-internet-slow.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The page is 2.3kB on the wire, and the single other request it makes (for the image) adds another 70kB. Taken together, this is a two-order-of-magnitude decrease in page size, with exactly the same content.&lt;p&gt;Every byte is sacred! This webpage infuriates me.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why is the Internet so Slow?</title><url>https://blog.apnic.net/2017/06/19/why-is-the-internet-so-slow/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lagged2Death</author><text>&lt;i&gt;If the 3x slowdown from the infrastructure were eliminated, each round-trip-time being 3x faster would affect all the protocols above, and we could immediately cut the latency inflation from ~37x to around 10x, without any protocol modifications.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The page this article is published on makes 87 separate network requests to 19 different domains. Even with a great deal of the content cached, it takes 7 seconds to reload over my WiFi today. This is because I&amp;#x27;m using an ad blocker; without one, the page makes more requests to more domains and transfers more stuff, slower.&lt;p&gt;It seems likely that cutting bloat would have a much bigger impact on responsiveness than infrastructure upgrades. Cutting bloat would produce benefits even (especially) in times and places where signals or infrastructure are marginal. Cutting bloat could mean your old phone or tablet computer could browse the web tolerably instead of ending up in a landfill. Cutting bloat from a website today produces a benefit, for all visitors, worldwide, &lt;i&gt;today&lt;/i&gt;. Improving infrastructure may be a good investment, but cutting bloat is a force multiplier.&lt;p&gt;The responsiveness of the web has been adjusted to optimize the number of eyeballs that see ads. If a site is too sluggish, people leave, but a site that&amp;#x27;s too fast is leaving money on the table. How many advertising, tracking, and affiliate domains would a web page like this connect to, if latency were cut by two thirds?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>samstave</author><text>What has always pissed me off is the global bandwidth overhead that ads have while not reducing the actual cost of connectivity to the average internet customer.&lt;p&gt;What percentage of my cellular data-consumption is specifically ads?&lt;p&gt;I need an app that tracks all data connections and tells me what percent went to which advertisers and a mechanism to block them or bill them to subsidize the cellular bill I pay for data, but that payment has a sizeable chuck allocated to my device displaying their ads.&lt;p&gt;Does anyone not recall the impetus behind the original paid cable tv model was that &amp;quot;you pay for the content of cable TV, thus we won&amp;#x27;t show you commercials&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The. They found out they could say &amp;quot;fuck you&amp;quot; to consumers, play commercials, hike up rates and also take in billions of government subsidies for infra upgrades that were never performed.&lt;p&gt;And companies wonder why some people want vigilante justice on such companies.</text></comment>