“It’s the Latency, Stupid”, 2001 (; backlinks; similar):
[Seminal essay explaining why the rollout of “broadband” home connections to replace 56k dialups had not improved regular WWW browsing as much as people expected: while broadband had greater throughput, it had similar (or worse) latency.
Because much of the wallclock time of any Internet connection is spent setting up and negotiating with the other end, and not that much is spent on the raw transfer of large numbers of bytes, the speedup is far smaller than one would expect by dividing the respective bandwidths.
Further, while bandwidth/throughput is easy to improve by adding more or higher-quality connections and can be patched elsewhere in the system by adding parallelism or upgrading parts or investing in data compression, the latency-afflicted steps are stubbornly serial, any time lost is physically impossible to retrieve, and many steps are inherently limited by the speed of light—more capacious connections quickly run into Amdahl’s law, where the difficult-to-improve serial latency-bound steps dominate the overall task. As Cheshire summarizes it:]
Fact One: Making more bandwidth is easy.
Fact Two: Once you have bad latency you’re stuck with it.
Fact Three: Current consumer devices have appallingly bad latency.
Fact Four: Making limited bandwidth go further is easy.
…That’s the problem with communications devices today. Manufacturers say “speed” when they mean “capacity”. The other problem is that as far as the end-user is concerned, the thing they want to do is transfer large files quicker. It may seem to make sense that a high-capacity slow link might be the best thing for the job. What the end-user doesn’t see is that in order to manage that file transfer, their computer is sending dozens of little control messages back and forth. The thing that makes computer communication different from television is interactivity, and interactivity depends on all those little back-and-forth messages.
The phrase “high-capacity slow link” that I used above probably looked very odd to you. Even to me it looks odd. We’ve been used to wrong thinking for so long that correct thinking looks odd now. How can a high-capacity link be a slow link? High-capacity means fast, right? It’s odd how that’s not true in other areas. If someone talks about a “high-capacity” oil tanker, do you immediately assume it’s a very fast ship? I doubt it. If someone talks about a “large-capacity” truck, do you immediately assume it’s faster than a small sports car?
We have to start making that distinction again in communications. When someone tells us that a modem has a speed of 28.8 kbit/sec we have to remember that 28.8 kbit/sec is its capacity, not its speed. Speed is a measure of distance divided by time, and ‘bits’ is not a measure of distance.
I don’t know how communications came to be this way. Everyone knows that when you buy a hard disk you should check what its seek time is. The maximum transfer rate is something you might also be concerned with, but the seek time is definitely more important. Why does no one think to ask what a modem’s ‘seek time’ is? The latency is exactly the same thing. It’s the minimum time between asking for a piece of data and getting it, just like the seek time of a disk, and it’s just as important.
View HTML: