Any geeks in the house?

[pacwind3]

I am just curious, I remember when I first got on the internet, it was about 10 years ago. I remember it taking a bit of time for pages to load through my 56.6 modem, but it did the job.
Now days, I am on a cable modem, it screams at like 15 MB per second, downloads in a blink. But pages can still just load so slow.
I am no internet guru by any means, but am pretty computer savvy and spent 5 years as a helpdesk tech.
In all honesty, I thought by now we'd be to a point that when you went to a new web page, it would be like changing channels on your TV. You blink, the new page is there.

What gives? Is it all slowed down by the PC and the server on the other end?

[pelligrini]

It could be the server on the other end, could be the upstream rate from that server. Then there's all the hops in between. A tracert to the slow site could tell you if one of the hops is slow.

If you've got some large downloads going, and try to load another page you can see a delay as well. There would be limited bandwidth for the acknowledge packets.

Even with my 10Mb cable connection my upstream speed is capped at 1Mb, but most sites aren't hosted from residential connections either.

[JR]

Re-directs to ad servers is the biggest culprit, in my uneducated opinion.

JR

[poolhound]

There are a number of things that could be going on.

Yes your PC could be hindering speed if you are running out of resources but most web pages are pretty lightweight so shouldnt be an issue and if that were the problem you would notice your PC dragging like a snail with everything else.

As others mentioned its not just your connection that dictates the speed. All this sets is your bandwidth. It is likely that there is congestion somewhere else in the network.

Its like the speed limit and car capacity on a road or freeway. Even though in theory one could travel at 65mph this would only be true on a relatively empty freeway. Once all lanes are full such as at rush hour speeds drop as the capacity of the freeway (bandwidth) fills. You also have the issue that even though (hyperthetically) one could drive at 150-200mph on an empty freeway, the law adds a governer to prevent this and some cars just cant go that fast no matter how wide or straight the road.

You have probably already tried this but if you want to check out your speed try speakeasy.net or speedtest.net. You can see how you perform to various of their nodes.

[Wood_workur]

ads do slow it down, along with an outdated browser, and traffic congestion.

[docrowan]

I would also say the amount of info being sent is much, much greater. 10 years ago, most of the information was text and low res graphics and photos. Now we've got streaming banners, high res graphics, etc. If you could take your current computer and internet connection back to 1998, I'll bet you would be seeing everything move at the blink of an eye.

[jonmulzer]

Minus latency of course. Latency is a big eater of time. Also, try the new Firefox, it is amazingly quick and efficient. And try surfing the web on Linux. Their TCP/IP stack is soooooo much more efficient. When it comes to TCP/IP, Windows and Linux are night and day. It is certainly not all about raw connection speed.

BTW, most of your connection speeds are rated as raw data. When you take out all the overhead you lose a significant amount. Also, never discount nostalgia. Back then you probably could have went and grabbed a soda while waiting for a page to load. Today most people have a second or two lag and think it is the end of the world. Think back to your 56K days and whether or not you would ever think of streaming audio or video over such connections. The answer is either no or that you would write the next great American novel while waiting for it to load.

[LCHIEN]

I think you are confusing the difference betwen streaming speed and access response speed.

When data is streamed from one source, like a movie file. mp3 file, or a picture, it sends continually, block after block with few gaps or waiting in between and your computer receives an writes the data much like a conveyor belt, moving in bulk. Testing DSLSPEED.COM or similar only gives you this streaming speed.

However, when you access a web page, it sometimes takes seconds to load.
The reason for this is all the short lookups that have to be done in sequential rather than streaming fashion.

For example, when you hit www.BT3central.com, you have given an name but not an actual numeric IP address. This is for convenience because names ar more recognizble to humans than numbers, it also makes the site portable to different hardware. The browser sends a request to the internet DNS servers, requesting the registered IP address for bt3central and this request takes time (in fact it may take 3 or more requests to DNS servers to resolve the name), then the DNS server responds with the IP address (67.228.97.169). Then your browser requests the data at the IP address, and data comes back. The web page is littered with more DNS references for pctures, ads, etc. that each need to be looked up and then accessed, again this makes the code portable.

The time it takes to reach servers is on the order of tens of milliseconds to several seconds. Browsers are set to wait about 10 seconds before giving up with the 404 errors. From personal experience you can hit servers in your company's network in ten ms or so, servers around the US in about 50-100 ms and servers in overseas locations in a few hundred milliseconds. Satellite hops take about 1000 ms.

So hitting a new page that is not cached in your computer can take a dozen or more lookups. I just "pinged" BT3central and it took me 80 ms. That's the round trip time after the computer obtained the DNS number. So a dozen lookups could take around a second or two (get the DNS, get the picture = two accesses, times 80 ms times 12= 2000 ms). More complex pages with distant servers would take more time. The megabyte of web page info and pictures probably only takes 100-200 ms to stream in once the pages are located and accessed.

[crokett]

Loring beat me to it. It does not take time to send stuff it takes time to find it, and that really hasn't decreaesed all that much since there is so much more stuff out there to look for. What HAS changed is once you find it how fast you can get it. So with higher bandwidth more stuff can be sent to you.

[jziegler]

There's also an issue with the number of items making up a page being downloaded simultaneously. I believe that the http standard only allows for two simultaneous downloads. One of those must finish before the next begins. If you have a page with 50 small elements to download (not that uncommon, think of all the little icons on the edit screen here), they download in sequence. Each one takes time, and has latency. Add it all up, and it still takes time. More connections would speed up some things, but probably at the cost of increased network congestion.

Jim

[vaking]

Technologically - Loring said it well. I find the psychology here interesting too. There was a time when I was watching a 13" TV at standard resolution and enjoying it. Now I am sitting in front of a giant 50" TV watching it at 1080P and complaining that there is nothing to watch. At first - let's do a little math. Standard resolution was 700x480 interlaced. Now it it is 1920X1080 progressive. That means my screen now needs to receive 12 times as many pixels as it was then in the same time so I can watch the movie. Please notice - that presumes my TV had as many colors then as it has now. Back then I had few channels, now I have few hundred. So my cable provider is hard at work feeding a thousand times the amount of information to me that I was getting then. What do I get as a result? I have numerous channels I never watch. I have some channels that show some movies diluted 50/50 with all kind of commercials. I have few channels that are supposed to be premium and have no commercial interruptions. But wait - what is that small picture near the bottom of my screen that frequently pops up in the middle of the movie and annoys the h**l out of me? I know - it is a commercial of another movie that is being shown on this channel at some other time. They don't put commercial interruptions on premium channels, they put commercial right in the middle of the movie giving it part of my screen real estate. Instead of allocating time for a commercial - let's allocate space. Now you know why you need a bigger TV and higher resolution. This is so the content provider can feed you more commercials and charge advertisers for it (on top of charging you for premium channels).
Internet is not much different. It was once advertized and Information superhighway. The truth is - information there did not increase much compared to the time when we used 56Kbits/sec modems. But now you can enjoy so much more commercials while the page is loading. And we have commercials with streaming video, sound, you name it. They are so good at consuming your bandwidth - surely you need a better Internet connection.