Why is the Internet so Slow?
<i>If the 3x slowdown from the infrastructure were eliminated, each round-trip-time being 3x faster would affect all the protocols above, and we could immediately cut the latency inflation from ~37x to around 10x, without any protocol modifications.</i><p>The page this article is published on makes 87 separate network requests to 19 different domains. Even with a great deal of the content cached, it takes 7 seconds to reload over my WiFi today. This is because I'm using an ad blocker; without one, the page makes more requests to more domains and transfers more stuff, slower.<p>It seems likely that cutting bloat would have a much bigger impact on responsiveness than infrastructure upgrades. Cutting bloat would produce benefits even (especially) in times and places where signals or infrastructure are marginal. Cutting bloat could mean your old phone or tablet computer could browse the web tolerably instead of ending up in a landfill. Cutting bloat from a website today produces a benefit, for all visitors, worldwide, <i>today</i>. Improving infrastructure may be a good investment, but cutting bloat is a force multiplier.<p>The responsiveness of the web has been adjusted to optimize the number of eyeballs that see ads. If a site is too sluggish, people leave, but a site that's too fast is leaving money on the table. How many advertising, tracking, and affiliate domains would a web page like this connect to, if latency were cut by two thirds?