How do internet speed optimizers work (if they do at all)?

07
2014-07
  • Matrym

    Are applications that claim to improve web speeds effective? If so, how? I would have guessed they were scammy, but I suppose if they can reroute traffic to a closer datacenter it might be possible?

    • Answers
  • William Hilsum

    I wouldn't call them scammy, but, they are far from perfect and when I last looked in to this sector, it is a complete waste of time for the majority of people.

    Datacenter location has a part to play, but, it is more than that (remember, if you access a page, the caching server still has to get it from the source server - if anything, it adds another step!).

    The main way it works is through compression - on a dial up modem / similar old connection, it can really improve everyday browsing speeds.

  • vtest

    It depends of how you define web speeds. And what exactly do you expect to speed up. Here are a couple of aspects:

    • a caching http proxy will make sites load faster if you visit them often and if they have static content. It'll be slower once, when the proxy will fetch stuff into its cache, as William Hilsum pointed, but then cached content will load faster (until the cache entries will expire and the proxy will request them again). squid is a good example of http caching proxy.
    • a filtering proxy will make sites load faster by not loading misc ads and banners. There's a big difference between loading things and not showing them (like certain browser plugins do) and not loading unwanted things at all. privoxy and polipo are good examples of filtering proxies
    • a caching DNS server. There still are unfortunate cases when ISPs neglect the performance of their DNS servers - in the evening everybody gets home and starts surfing the net. And... it looks horriby slow because of those slow DNS queries. Of course, there are workarounds like using OpenDNS (and these workarounds have their own drawbacks, like redirects to ads etc). But having a local caching DNS server under your own control is good. pdnsd is a good choice.
  • Journeyman Geek

    A good many 'web optimisers' are proxies which compress images - opera turbo is an example, and netbooster (which came with my dad's indian wireless internet dongle) seems to work the same way. Its a trade off between quality and speed.


    • Related Question

    internet - How different is downloading a file from accessing a webpage?
  • Lazer

    I ask because here I have download speeds which are like 1MBps while the web pages take a very long time to load (definitely not 1 MBps).

    I guess accessing a webpage is basically requesting it from a server, and then in a way "downloading" the page and then rendering it.

    Am I wrong? What can be the reason that I have such a difference in download and webpage speeds?


    • Related Answers
  • David Thornley

    Some web pages have a lot of individual components, all of which have to be downloaded separately. Your browser handles all of this for you, but often with diminished performance, since a lot of different connections have to be made, and likely some will have to wait for others to finish. Moreover, web pages often have data from various different servers (the advertisements probably come from their own server), and a delay for any element can slow down the whole. A file is a simple download of one file from one place.

    Therefore, bandwidth (the amount of data you can download in unit time) is very important in file downloads. Latency (the extra time) matters a lot more on the web.

  • Bart van Heukelom

    This might be caused by any/all of the following:

    • The server is slow.
    • The server has a slow connection.
    • Your computer is slow. The rendering takes time as well.
    • While the connection allows 1Mbps of traffic, it has a high latency. Compare this to a ship. You can load a lot of stuff in a ship, but it will take a long time to reach it's destination.
  • Nissan Fan

    It's important to understand how a web page is downloaded in order to understand why downloading a 1MB file may be faster than even 256kb that comprises a website.

    1. If GZIP compression is present in the web server for HTML/JavaScript/etc. (most likely), your browser will download compressed content and then have to decompress it.
    2. Images may be only 30-40k, but decoded they can amount to many megabytes in memory
    3. If the website has multiple external files (CSS/JavaScript/Images) each of those files can be downloaded on a separate connection as part of your browser composing the page
    4. Downloading a file is a basic operation in HTTP/FTP which is streamlined. There's no content to discern and render
  • 8088

    Not yet mentioned - there's way more to a typical web page download these days than the text your see rendered in your browser. If the page you are visiting has the ability to be edited, it probably contains a lot of code to handle that. TinyMCE is a popular javascript "Rich Text" editor for the web. It's tiny but it not that tiny.

    TinyMCE

    This is just one example, but this sort of thing bloats all kinds of web pages and can make your browsing experience not what you expect. Depending on the person authoring the web page or web application, you may end up downloading an app like this whether you ever use it or not. It's just loaded into memory, waiting.

    Another aspect is psychological. When you select a file for download, you expect to wait for it to arrive. When you click a link to a page, you more inclined to expect instant gratification, so wqhile I'm not saying 'it's all in your head', there is definitely an expectation there.

  • John T

    For a download, the connection is negotiated at the start of the file transfer and your speed picks up to normal. That part of file transfer is slow (as you may sometimes see in your web browser status bar.. sending request to [site]... waiting for reply from [site] and it takes a while). Every time you request a web page, that same negotiation goes on. It could also be that the server may be slow at responding to requests due to load, or your browser is slow at rendering data.

  • Raynet

    You didn't specify which browser you were using and what kind of internet connection you had.

    If the internet connection is eg. satellite link, it has high download bandwidth and very slow upload bandwidth and high latency. Similar thing applies to 3G/HSDPA mobile connection, though latency is lower than in satellite but still often 10-30x compared to ADSL or cablemodem.

    This can be made even worse by using a bad browser like Internet Explorer that only opens 2-3 concurrent connections when downloading the files from the webserver. With mobilephone type connections, a HTTP connection that does the 3-way TCP/IP handshake, a single file can take almost a second before it begins to download, now combine this with just few simultaneous connections from the browser and it suddenly takes tens of seconds to download small webpage that has several images and stylesheets and javascripts linked to it.

    I use Opera which allows me to set the concurrent connections to some very hign number, eg 32 or more. This means that when opening a website over high latency link, the browser takes couple seconds to do the handshakes with the server and then it downloads 32 items simultaneously and often can max out the download bandwidth which would never happen if the browser did download single/few files at a time.

    The speed difference can also happen if you computer is slow or doesn't have enough memory and the browser can then bog down the machine whilst it renders the page. This can be avoided by using a faster/lighter browser like Opera or if possible, set the browser not to render page until it has downloaded all required elements. Nowadays browsers try to render the page as soon as possible, which usually causes them to re-render the page multiple times and this can be slow on an older machine.