Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Monday September 16 2019, @05:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the things-expand-to-exceed-the-space-provided dept.

https://danluu.com/web-bloat/

A couple years ago, I took a road trip from Wisconsin to Washington and mostly stayed in rural hotels on the way. I expected the internet in rural areas too sparse to have cable internet to be slow, but I was still surprised that a large fraction of the web was inaccessible. Some blogs with lightweight styling were readable, as were pages by academics who hadn't updated the styling on their website since 1995. But very few commercial websites were usable (other than Google). When I measured my connection, I found that the bandwidth was roughly comparable to what I got with a 56k modem in the 90s. The latency and packetloss were significantly worse than the average day on dialup: latency varied between 500ms and 1000ms and packetloss varied between 1% and 10%. Those numbers are comparable to what I'd see on dialup on a bad day.

Despite my connection being only a bit worse than it was in the 90s, the vast majority of the web wouldn't load. Why shouldn't the web work with dialup or a dialup-like connection? It would be one thing if I tried to watch youtube and read pinterest. It's hard to serve videos and images without bandwidth. But my online interests are quite boring from a media standpoint. Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text, even if it happens to be styled with images and fancy javascript. In fact, I recently tried using w3m (a terminal-based web browser that, by default, doesn't support css, javascript, or even images) for a week and it turns out there are only two websites I regularly visit that don't really work in w3m (twitter and zulip, both fundamentally text based sites, at least as I use them)[1].

More recently, I was reminded of how poorly the web works for people on slow connections when I tried to read a joelonsoftware post while using a flaky mobile connection. The HTML loaded but either one of the five CSS requests or one of the thirteen javascript requests timed out, leaving me with a broken page. Instead of seeing the article, I saw three entire pages of sidebar, menu, and ads before getting to the title because the page required some kind of layout modification to display reasonably. Pages are often designed so that they're hard or impossible to read if some dependency fails to load. On a slow connection, it's quite common for at least one depedency to fail. After refreshing the page twice, the page loaded as it was supposed to and I was able to read the blog post, a fairly compelling post on eliminating dependencies.

[1] excluding internal Microsoft stuff that's required for work. Many of the sites are IE only and don't even work in edge. I didn't try those sites in w3m but I doubt they'd work! In fact, I doubt that even half of the non-IE specific internal sites would work in w3m.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Monday September 16 2019, @11:34PM (4 children)

    by fido_dogstoyevsky (131) <axehandleNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday September 16 2019, @11:34PM (#894886)

    ..Another phenomenon at work is the continued push for broadband rollout to the rural areas - which isn't a bad thing, but... if 99%+ of the text content of the web were accessible from the sticks, there's be less of a push to get the bandwidth fixed...

    But low bandwidth will slow down distro hopping...

    --
    It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 16 2019, @11:58PM (3 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday September 16 2019, @11:58PM (#894894)

    Dear God, our corporate network is so packet filter throttled that it took me 30 minutes to download flipping Raspbian (2GB) at work today.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday September 17 2019, @12:42AM (2 children)

      by anubi (2828) on Tuesday September 17 2019, @12:42AM (#894920) Journal

      It took me a week to download the offline OSMand set of street maps to my phone at the local coffee shop. I was getting about 20KB per sec as measured by "GasFlow", an Android internet connection speed monitor app.

      Is your corporate site showing up at that speed?

      Would this same business hire salesmen that take forever and a day to say something, hard of hearing, and walk away from customers?

      My guess is most corporate CEO have no idea what an exasperating experience their website is to those who do not have executive resources to see it.

      --
      "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 17 2019, @01:24PM (1 child)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday September 17 2019, @01:24PM (#895124)

        The issue has been raised with our local site head of R&D, who has escalated it with me to corporate IT, who have dicked around for nearly a year now doing nothing helpful but proposing several stupid ideas like blocking Facetime (which field support staff use in actual product support capacity...)

        The hope is that in the next round of "upgrades" this open complaint ticket might sway a decision or two toward higher performance.

        The reality is: I stay home to do a lot of my work - and that's not a bad thing from my perspective.

        --
        🌻🌻 [google.com]
        • (Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday September 19 2019, @12:20AM

          by anubi (2828) on Thursday September 19 2019, @12:20AM (#895909) Journal

          I hope my unsolicited post can help you convince management that a lot of us out there do not have the latest hardware and software tech.

          Just yesterday, I had a very exasperating experience trying to buy tires on a website. My local wheel alignment business had directed me to that site, told me to pick out some tires, and he would mount and do an alignment. Everything worked, but the website.

          I kept getting hung up. On JavaScript. To places having nothing to do with tires. Facebook, Pinterest, and scores of others. Both my phone and laptop were overwhelmed. Like a DOS attack. Flooded with crap.

          I need special load rated E, 10 ply tires. God knows how bad I wanted to say "screw it", and go to WalMart. Just to avoid having to deal with that business website. When my mechanic saw how exasperated I was getting having to deal with it, he tried to help me. He couldn't get the order to take either before the fields went dead. On both my phone and laptop.

          My mechanic went old school, got on the phone to them, and got the tires, at the special web price.

          I almost had to take what WalMart had in stock so that the Corporate Webmaster could insist on ramming stuff in me than I could take.

          I have to remind myself that in todays high tech world, I am the least important part of the business experience....I am the customer. At least I was important enough to my mechanic to keep me.

          Most internet business would say I wasn't good enough for them. Close the door in my face. Call me an invalid. Let them worship their server, which is rude as hell to me, then wonder why WalMart and Amazon is making all the money.

          Incidentally, Amazon works fine for me. So does AliExpress, eBay, WalMart.

          It's just got so I really hate dealing with business websites. Not all of em, but some can really have me climbing the walls.

          --
          "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]