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Most of the Web Really Sucks If You Have a Slow Connection (danluu.com)
Dan Luu, hardware/software engineer at Microsoft, writes in a blog post: While it's easy to blame page authors because there's a lot of low-hanging fruit on the page side, there's just as much low-hanging fruit on the browser side. Why does my browser open up 6 TCP connections to try to download six images at once when I'm on a slow satellite connection? That just guarantees that all six images will time out! I can sometimes get some images to load by refreshing the page a few times (and waiting ten minutes each time), but why shouldn't the browser handle retries for me? If you think about it for a few minutes, there are a lot of optimizations that browsers could do for people on slow connections, but because they don't, the best current solution for users appears to be: use w3m when you can, and then switch to a browser with ad-blocking when that doesn't work. But why should users have to use two entirely different programs, one of which has a text-based interface only computer nerds will find palatable?
No idea how your connection speed adds anything to this.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why does my browser open up 6 TCP connections to try to download six images at once when I'm on a slow satellite connection?
i used to have this problem until i switched to Lynx. Now pesky things like popups and adware are a thing of the past! six streams indeed.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Everything Internet-related really sucks if you have a slow connection.
#DeleteFacebook
Why does my browser open up 6 TCP connections to try to download six images at once when I'm on a slow satellite connection? That just guarantees that all six images will time out!
The problem is not opening 6 connections, or failure to retry, but a timeout that's too short.
Tell that to all the people with slow connections, who's operating system is constantly phoning home to a dozen different servers and hijacking their bandwidth to spread itself on a p2p network.
I have the same problem with smartphone apps. If you don't have the highest LTE connection possible, the app is a pain to use. Go to a rural area, and you may not even get it to open. Web sites are the same way. They give developers super fast connections, and they develop applications that require that speed. They don't put them on slow networks and test to see if they are even useful on a basic level.
You can configure this setting in Firefox. It doesn't look like Chrome has a similar configuration.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Abou...
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server - default = 6
Try setting this to 1.
Source:
https://support.mozilla.org/t5...
A lot of what drives modern internet design is e-commerce. If you're on a slow connection, you probably don't have much money to spend, so why should anyone care? Or so the thinking goes....
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Even with fast Internet connections, websites are so bloated with ancillary scripts and tracking code and cross linking to 20 different various advertising and content servers that you get stuck waiting no matter what. CDNs helped but you're still hostage to X advertising companies one slow server because it's not on that CDN.
all show which side their bread is buttered on.
When the advertising content loads first and the page rebuilds/rearranges itself 6 or 8 times and finally the content you want to see becomes visible or stabilizes enough to click a link.
I think some of the pages are designed to do this on purpose.
You get a glimpse of the content you are looking for and click on a link just as the page rebuilds itself and the link has changed to an ad and the cash register rings on a click through.
Rick B.
Most web browser engines are open source. Go and modify one or many of them to handle slow connections better.
And after you get done with that, you can take your car's engine apart and redesign it to get 400 miles per gallon.
It had a number of options where you could set up the number of global connections and per page. And yes, it was useful during the early days of dialup.
But anyway, most of the web sucks in this regard. Period. Sites are horribly designed these days - a gazillion JS dependencies, unnecessarily large images which get scaled, zero concern for mobile devices, etc.
The digital divide in the US became most evident (to me) in this last election cycle.
If you look at the page weights of 'conservative' vs 'liberal' news sites the former are much smaller and tailored to people on even a dial up, in large part because they know their demographic. Rural internet in the US flat out sucks. We have counties in my state, not more than 3 hours outside of Chicago that still have dialup as a viable option.
Drudge Report loads amazingly fast. Huffington Post does not. Drudge was 1.13 MB in size with 44% of that images. (The site I used to analyze them was done with Drudge's 14 assets long before Huffington Post stalled at 220/222 assets.)
The art of optimization seems to have disappeared, it made a small resurgence when web developers tried to optimize for the mobile web, but it doesn't look like most developers ever tried that hard.
It's a closed feedback loop. Developers live in places with fast Internet, test in places with fast Internet and then don't understand what it's like anywhere else. Students on college campuses live with gigabit internet and Internet2 connections to peer universities. They move to cities that Comcast pays attention to.
The best suggestion I have: Turn off images, configure the browser not to thread connections, and get involved in local government to get faster internet to your area.
Be sure to run adblockers, stripping out adverts makes a big difference.
But even slashdot is a big fat bloated pig. no reason at all to load everything and a giant pile of JS.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And after you get done with that, you can take your car's engine apart and redesign it to get 400 miles per gallon.
It's not hard to get a 400 MPG average. The trouble is, getting back to the top of the hill afterwards.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Ssh, and telnet work just fine over a slow connection and so does email so long as it doesn't have a load of attachments plus other protocols such as gopher. People did manage to use the internet over dial up before HTTP/HTML came along and sucked up as much bandwidth as it could!
There is a hilarious (and sad) commentary on website bloat at http://idlewords.com/talks/web... that shows truely outrageous examples of this sin.
1. Sites that play videos when the load.
2. Sites that display the entire page for three seconds and then cover it with a full screen ad.
3. Sites that constantly reorganize the page as it loads new ads.
4. Sites that load ads FIRST instead of the actual content.
Bottom line is the web sucks because Madison Avenue got a hold of it. They aren't content with placing an ad like they do in papers or magazines. They all in your face and FORCE your participation in message delivery. And before you even mention Ad Block, more and more sites simply refuse to load when you have that installed/enabled.
Most browsers open 6 connections because most connections these day can handle it. If you live in a time warp (like most of the US) with tech that's 20 years old, then you have to use 20 year old tricks of the trade.
"Back in the day" we had 56k at home or for the rich folk, 128k (ISDN), double ISDN if you were really lucky. We had the same problems, the 'web' was getting fancy with things like Flash, video and high-def images because all the 'work' was being done at places that had either access through an institution with at least Fractional T1's and things like 100Mbps home-internet copper/fiber connections for $10 were being promised as less than a decade away by the ISP's which were then repeatedly subsidized by the governments to do just that.
How did we do it:
a) Set up your own DNS caching servers
b) Set up your own HTTP/HTTPS proxy caching servers with giant caches
c) Proper QoS to make sure certain traffic had priority over others, small packets and small buffers
d) Set up your own servers (such as IMAP/SMTP, gaming etc) and have them sync during times of lesser activity. These days, with a bit of API tinkering, even social media can be done that way.
We had LAN parties with 100's of computers behind a 1Mbps cable modem, no problem.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Be sure to run adblockers, stripping out adverts makes a big difference.
But even slashdot is a big fat bloated pig. no reason at all to load everything and a giant pile of JS.
I highly recommend https://alterslash.org it removes all the bloat from slashdot.org Thanks to Jonathan Hedley!
The problem with a satellite connection is not precisely related to latency but rather to jitter, the large differences in latency from one packet to the next. This happens as a result of rain fade, or a poorly engineered link to your transponder on the bird, or a variety of other more infrequent issues.
You can (and should) up your TCP timeout values from the default 3 seconds on a satellite connection, and adjust the http keep-alive timeout, etc, but a lot of times this just means you wait longer to be told when the connection fails.
The solution is a combination of caching, compression, and a performance enhancing proxy or PEP. The PEP does TCP spoofing, basically faking the acknowledgements to speed up the transmission of packets. Compression is similar to the MNP5/v.42bis stuff from modem days applied to a satellite connection. Caching is basically Squid. A lot of PEPs combine all three functions into one - Riverbed is a really good example, though i've worked with pretty much every vendor and they all do the same stuff, with differences in ease of use and efficency.
Implement the timeout fixes, implement a good PEP with all three of the ingredients noted, and make sure the connection is dialed in well with a good shot (line of sight) without physical impediments like trees, buildings, and most importantly microwave interference, and you should have a fairly reliable internet connection. You will still take hits, but you can look at the front of the satellite modem and see that is happening if it's an iDirect or something similar.
Bottom line though is that unless you are taking hits, you should be able to set up downloads of a lot of images and never see a timeout.
- someone who has spent a lot of time doing this (and living off sat connections) in awful places in the world
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
A lot of times, bad MTU settings are the problem with a sat link. The problem is simply stated: GRE tunnels are common on such links, and a GRE tunnel will encapsulate each packet and add a 16 byte header. Since the modems usually only permit a 1500 byte MTU, this means the maximum packet size you can get through the GRE tunnel will be 1484 bytes long, inclusive of header. If someone sends out a packet that is maximum size for a 1500 byte MTU, and sets the DF (Don't Fragment) bit, when the packet hits this GRE tunnel it will be dropped. This happens frequently with bad SSL implementations.
This is only one version of MTU problems with sat links. There are others.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
oh boy....
Your DNS can easily be local, on your network, and it means that everyone connecting to your network, regardless of device, has the advantage of ad blocking.
I don't need to jailbreak my mother in law's iPad for her to get the advantage of the DNS blocking, I don't have to root my wife's android, every device that comes in to the house and connects to the network automatically gets the advantage of ad blocking just by virtue of connecting. And best of all, I can make updates to one device instead of dozens as new ad domains appear.
Hosts is great for people who only use a PC, never use a mobile device, have few devices, and don't know how to configure a DNS server, but for true geeks (the main audience of this site) it's lacking on many levels.
There's a reason we don't all just have hosts files for the whole internet, there's a reason DNS was invented, those same reasons are what makes it superior to a hosts file for this application as well.