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Ask YC: Is Internet Slowing down?

7 points by tx ↗ HN
Normally I dislike "Ask YC" posts but I am genuinely curious about this one, so I decided to ask:

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.

When I got my first broadband in 2000, most sites would load instantly or nearly instantly. These days everything (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.

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?

What kind of "cloud computing" are we talking about if we're spending more and more time in front of loading... banners? Even gmail, from a God of Scaling, has slowed down for me and isn't getting any better.

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.

Again, is it just me?

14 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 30.4 ms ] thread
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.

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)
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

dkokelley
<3 seconds on a 6mbit/sec connection.
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.

ptm
The cisco site took around 30s on my 256Kbps BSNL connection.

BTW Anyone else from from India here ?

ews
We can try sfbay.craigslist.org (99% text)
cninja
For the cisco, it takes about 6 seconds on my average speed connection. If you want to see what takes so long, I recommend using FireFox's Firebug extension. In Cisco's case, it is a simple 20k html file, but then there are 3 js files and 8 css files each of which has to be loaded in a particular order before the page is rendered.
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?