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Ask HN: Time Warner Cable doubled my internet speed. Why dont pages load faster?

1 points by allsystemsgo ↗ HN
I've done speed tests dozens of times. A few things I've noticed:

1. Though I have significantly higher speeds, pages made "load" quicker but, I'll still see an activity indicator. The pages don't load asynchronously in other words.

2. Speeds seem to spike up and down quite often.

What gives? They double my speed at no cost to me, but I don't see much improvement, but speed tests indicate that I should be seeing improvement.

9 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 33.0 ms ] thread
minimaxir
Capacity is not the same as throughput.
amalag
Pages are complex and non-trivial to render nowadays. Your computer speed is probably playing a part.
allsystemsgo
Brand new 5K iMac with maxed out specs so, I don't think it's my machine. Happens on all our machines unfortunately. :-(
amalag
OK it's not your machine ;-) I mentioned it because I have seen newer non-mac laptops be pretty slow.

Try wired instead of wireless to see if that is the issue. Try changing your DNS to Google's or OpenDNS and see if that helps.

ColinWright
Stuart Cheshire's rant may be relevant - "It's the Latency, Stupid"

https://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html

Discussed at length here on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826768

Many other articles on roughly the same topic:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=It%27s+the+latency+stupid

allsystemsgo
Hm, interesting. The HN thread doesn't seem to propose many solutions. Is this something a new modem would fix? Time Warner gave me a (very large and unattractive) modem. I have an old-ish Apple wireless router plugged into it.
ColinWright
My impression as a non-expert is that there is no non-commercial solution, every system for Joe Public is crap in this regard. They get away with it because everyone quotes top possible speeds without considering latency. With web pages especially, you make lots of connections and get lots of small files, each delivered extremely quickly after a measurable pause. Hence poor perceived performance.

It boils down to large pages with lots of bloat, analytics, ads, and formatting. So no, I don't think a new modem would fix it. Welcome to the modern web.

Of course, I could be wrong.

PaulHoule
Lots of things can wreck your internet performance. For instance, when I first got Frontier DSL it was often subjectively slower than dialup because the DNS servers sucked and could take 4 seconds or so to get back.

I installed djbdns and it got much much better.

allsystemsgo
Not familiar with djbdns. Looks like it could improve my speeds in theory. I'll look into it. Thanks!