8 ms·

I think a lot of the time when people say the network is slow. They really mean their backend is slow. With a fast backend ~1-5ms response times (not even that

I think a lot of the time when people say the network is slow. They really mean their backend is slow. With a fast backend ~1-5ms response times (not even that fast). Streaming compression over something like SSE to keep your response sub 1kb packet (roughly an ethernet MTU). With a push based model, pushing data to a user is half their RTT latency. They will only experience their full RTT on actions they trigger. Now the network to you is distance to the server (not your rail/nextjs backend taking 400ms). Things like 4G and 3G are fine. The real problem is when you have such bad signal you effectively have no down or up.

fhub 26d ago
1-5ms response time is clearly hard for most real world endpoints.
- fallingbananna 26d ago
  I don't know how hard it is. But I can certainly say there is no business inscentive for it. When it comes to improving performance by a few ms, or implementing a new feature, business people will always choose a new feature, unless the current performance is unbearably slow (we're talking regular 1.5s+ wait times for BE response). And it's not even a modern problem, legacy software written 20 years ago has the same latency than most modern backends from my experience.
  - eudamoniac 25d ago
    When I worked at Cisco we had regular 10 second responses on our main flows (bad data model) and still couldn't get buy-in to fix it.
swiftcoder 26d ago
> With a fast backend ~1-5ms response times (not even that fast). Even though benchmarks suggest this sort of performance should be trivial, most real-world servers I have interacted with do not reliably managed to process a request, make a roundtrip to the DB, and return a response in <5ms
- inigyou 25d ago
  But why is that?
- andersmurphy 25d ago
  Project into sqlite on your app server is the main trick I use. Denormalize if you have to. Hell, for a lot of projects you don't even need to get that fancy. Run a single server with an embedde database, running Go or Java and you're good to go.
troupo 26d ago
Reddit's reaponses are rarely above 400ms. And yet their frontend routinely takes several seconds to render that response

fhub 26d ago

1-5ms response time is clearly hard for most real world endpoints.

fallingbananna 26d ago
I don't know how hard it is. But I can certainly say there is no business inscentive for it. When it comes to improving performance by a few ms, or implementing a new feature, business people will always choose a new feature, unless the current performance is unbearably slow (we're talking regular 1.5s+ wait times for BE response). And it's not even a modern problem, legacy software written 20 years ago has the same latency than most modern backends from my experience.
- eudamoniac 25d ago
  When I worked at Cisco we had regular 10 second responses on our main flows (bad data model) and still couldn't get buy-in to fix it.

swiftcoder 26d ago

> With a fast backend ~1-5ms response times (not even that fast). Even though benchmarks suggest this sort of performance should be trivial, most real-world servers I have interacted with do not reliably managed to process a request, make a roundtrip to the DB, and return a response in <5ms

inigyou 25d ago
But why is that?
andersmurphy 25d ago
Project into sqlite on your app server is the main trick I use. Denormalize if you have to. Hell, for a lot of projects you don't even need to get that fancy. Run a single server with an embedde database, running Go or Java and you're good to go.

troupo 26d ago

Reddit's reaponses are rarely above 400ms. And yet their frontend routinely takes several seconds to render that response