“Web Bloat”, 2017-02-08 (; backlinks; similar):
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 packet loss were substantially worse than the average day on dialup: latency varied between 500ms and 1000ms and packet loss 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…When Microsoft looked at actual measured connection speeds, they found that half of Americans don’t have broadband speed. Heck, AOL had 2 million dial-up subscribers in 2015, just AOL alone. Outside of the U.S., there are even more people with slow connections. I recently chatted with Ben Kuhn, who spends a fair amount of time in Africa, about his internet connection:
I’ve seen ping latencies as bad as ~45 sec and packet loss as bad as 50% on a mobile hotspot in the evenings from Jijiga, Ethiopia. (I’m here now and currently I have 150ms ping with no packet loss but it’s 10am). There are some periods of the day where it ~never gets better than 10 sec and ~10% loss. The internet has gotten a lot better in the past ~year; it used to be that bad all the time except in the early mornings.
…Let’s load some websites that programmers might frequent with a variety of simulated connections to get data on page load times…The timeout for tests was 6 minutes; anything slower than that is listed as FAIL. Pages that failed to load are also listed as FAIL. A few things that jump out from the table are:
A large fraction of the web is unusable on a bad connection. Even on a good (0% packet loss, no ping spike) dialup connection, some sites won’t load…If you were to look at the 90%-ile results, you’d see that most pages fail to load on dialup and the “Bad” and “😱” connections are hopeless for almost all sites.
Some sites will use a lot of data!
…The flaw in the “page weight doesn’t matter because average speed is fast” [claim] is that if you average the connection of someone in my apartment building (which is wired for 1Gbps internet) and someone on 56k dialup, you get an average speed of 500 Mbps. That doesn’t mean the person on dialup is actually going to be able to load a 5MB website. The average speed of 3.9 Mbps comes from a 2014 Akamai report, but it’s just an average. If you look at 2016 report, you can find entire countries where more than 90% of IP addresses are slower than that!..“Use bcrypt” has become the mantra for a reasonable default if you’re not sure what to do when storing passwords. The web would be a nicer place if “use webpagetest” caught on in the same way. It’s not always the best tool for the job, but it sure beats the current defaults.
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