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Author Topic: After a week on a gigabit  (Read 13289 times)

aesmith

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Re: After a week on a gigabit
« Reply #15 on: April 02, 2020, 01:07:14 PM »

More seriously, I suspect that once a critical mass of people have access, bloated services will begin to appear that use it, so bloated that they stretch gigabit it to the limits.   That will then create a ‘need’ for everybody else to have it too.   So no doubt, I’ll soon be feeling left behind.
It's notable that whenever media like Radio 4 have a piece on broadband speeds, whether it's about UK being behind other countries, or about new initiatives, they never ever cite applications that require these speeds. Personally I hope that mainstream applications never bloat to that extent, just think how many would be disadvantaged if you needed a 300 meg connection to say access the library or online banking or do your tax return, or for your kids to submit their homework.
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: After a week on a gigabit
« Reply #16 on: April 02, 2020, 01:53:16 PM »

If the bloat does not happen, it’ll be a first.

We’ve seen the same in CPU speeds, memory and disk capacity, all of which have gone up by many orders of magnitude in two or three decades.   Yet we still face the need to regularly upgrade, the more the manufacturers have provided, the more consumers have consumed.
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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: After a week on a gigabit
« Reply #17 on: April 02, 2020, 05:52:21 PM »

IMO there's a huge difference between bloat (using more resources for no good reason) and what actually happened.

We use more CPU, RAM and HDD space because applications do more complicated things.  If you use a PC in the same way you did 20 years ago, the requirements wouldn't be as dramatically higher.  In fact, over the last 10 years things haven't increased that much, which has allowed mobile devices to creep closer in power and memory to a PC.

I know people using Atom/Celeron based devices to this day, with 4GB RAM and 32GB eMMC, because all they need to do is open a browser to do an online shop.  Sure its sluggish and some of that probably could be improved with better web design, but a lot of the changes that eat resources are quality of life improvements.

Granted on other websites, adverts are a huge resource hog, but then those websites wouldn't exist without them as they need to be paid for somehow.

So I don't think its honestly fair to call it bloat and I don't think bandwidth requirements going up is the same thing.  If it wasn't for YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, etc, then would there be much need for increased bandwidth outside of gaming?
« Last Edit: April 02, 2020, 05:58:06 PM by Alex Atkin UK »
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: After a week on a gigabit
« Reply #18 on: April 02, 2020, 07:46:52 PM »

It’s bloat, and it’s laziness by modern developers.

I wrote a 3d graphics engine for iOS less than a decade ago.   Getting it to present fluid motion at full refresh rate was a challenge, solved by a number of optimisation of which I felt quite proud.   When I revisit that same engine for new Apps, there is no need for clever optimisations.   The fast hardware removes all motivation to do so.

I began my career in mainframes.   A half Megabyte of memory was not untypical, and discs that resembled top loading washing machines ranged from around 80 to 200 MB.   These machines were plenty capable, supporting many users.
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Weaver

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Re: After a week on a gigabit
« Reply #19 on: April 02, 2020, 08:57:55 PM »

I began my career writing assembler for 8-bit microprocessors. Some had only 2k RAM. The Sinclair Spectrum had 48k i spent a year writing code for that. I used a DEC VAX every day; it had a dozen users and 1 MB RAM which was later upgraded to 8MB. I then wrote code for my company’s own new hardware and novel operating systems.
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Bowdon

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Re: After a week on a gigabit
« Reply #20 on: April 02, 2020, 11:11:39 PM »

As some have mentioned a lot is lazy developers.

I remember one fear when cd's became a valid gaming format was that it would be filled with flashy graphics and the games would stay at the same level and length, and sure enough that's happened.

I am interested though on how programmes could fill out a gigabit line. Maybe it'll be the return of the full motion videos (FMV) in games, at 4K!  ;D
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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: After a week on a gigabit
« Reply #21 on: April 02, 2020, 11:28:57 PM »

I guess coming at it from those days, it does come across as bloat.

But I still say there is a huge difference between making coding easier at the cost of code being inefficient vs increasing bandwidth consumption for, what reason exactly?  Its a very different scenario.
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: After a week on a gigabit
« Reply #22 on: April 02, 2020, 11:47:32 PM »

Ref increased bandwidth, my gripe is that 20 something years ago I could book hotel rooms, buy stuff from Maplin (Amazon not invented), check flight arrivals, all on a 28kbps dialup.

I’m willing to bet that today’s hotel booking sites, online shopping or flight checkers, would be so bloated they now depend on FTTC speeds, no longer viable on dialup, despite no change in the basic functionality they provide.

An exception might be video streaming.   Commercial cinema streaming rates are I think hundreds of Mbps and even then, some movie directors reckon quality is naff compared to film, they want even higher rates.   So streaming at cinema quality or better might be quite exciting, but would the core networks take the strain?   I doubt it - having trouble getting my head around it, but isn’t there an exponential factor involved?
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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: After a week on a gigabit
« Reply #23 on: April 03, 2020, 03:26:06 AM »

I see your point, but from the shops/hotels point of view its not a waste of bandwidth if it helps them sell you other products and services.

Also if I say go on booking.com, sure I wouldn't want to load it on dialup but I'm not seeing anything excessive.  None of these businesses want to pay for more resources than they absolutely need.

In the dialup days, websites had to be basic, to the point of barely being functional IMO.  I consider being able to clearly SEE the place I will be saying in the photos as absolutely added functionality over what it likely would have looked like before.  Where a do object are auto-play adverts or even videos related to an article.   If I'm visiting an article, its to read the darn article, not watch a video.

The biggest culprits for bloat are obviously big sites where adverts are their primary (or only) source of income.  What we have to remember there is that websites back in the dialup days were mostly an afterthought.  Nobody was really considering how they could could be profitable, plenty of sites ran at a loss, many still do today even with all that bloat.

As for cinema-quality streaming, I'm sure if they ever are willing to do that (and I would be very pleased if they did) the infrastructure will absolutely have caught up.  But I have my doubts as none of the current streaming services are willing to support even Bluray quality for people who have the connections able to handle it.

Incidentally I actually saw a leaked copy of the My Little Pony movie which I'm not sure if it was the master or cinema release but its around 200Mbit (DNxHD codec).  It does have much nicer colours than the Bluray though, but its almost impossible to play as VLC refuses to show more than one frame every one in a while, despite it claiming to be decoding every frame fine.
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niemand

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Re: After a week on a gigabit
« Reply #24 on: April 03, 2020, 11:16:20 AM »

If concerned about bloat on web pages I would strongly recommend looking at research on how intolerant people are of slow load times. The web pages follow the bandwidth, not the other way around.

Extensive research has been done on how long people will tolerate waiting for a page to load. It's really not a long time.

Quote
North American fashion retailer Nordstrom saw online sales fall 11% when its website response time slowed by just half a second, says Gopal Brugalette, who was the retailer's senior applied architect in performance engineering at the time.
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: After a week on a gigabit
« Reply #25 on: April 03, 2020, 02:14:32 PM »

@CarlIT, in case I forget to mention.. 

I am most certainly envious of your gigabit experience.  Wish I could have the same.  Don't let my cynicism spoil it.  :)
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niemand

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Re: After a week on a gigabit
« Reply #26 on: April 03, 2020, 07:21:57 PM »

You aren't. To be quite honest I don't really notice the difference between this and 300/50 95%+ of the time.

End of the day it's an Internet connection. Once you're into ultrafast territory it's degrees not step changes.
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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: After a week on a gigabit
« Reply #27 on: April 04, 2020, 05:08:26 AM »

You aren't. To be quite honest I don't really notice the difference between this and 300/50 95%+ of the time.

End of the day it's an Internet connection. Once you're into ultrafast territory it's degrees not step changes.

Its a rather different scenario when you're a gamer, and I don't even mean online gaming as honestly I think QoS handles that fine for my filthy casual use.

I'm looking forward to going Gigabit and just not having to think about if something I'm doing on one machine is going to cause issues for what I'm (or my mum) is doing on another.

I mean sure, 300/50 would help there, but I think Gigabit is the way to go as the chance of a single client ever maxing that out on its own is pretty slim, or if it does its going to be for a VERY short period of time.
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niemand

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Re: After a week on a gigabit
« Reply #28 on: April 05, 2020, 01:44:32 PM »

Gaming doesn't really make a lot of difference.

Steam can't touch the sides, let alone PSN or XBL and the less said about Nintendo's effort the better.

Haven't tried Origin because it sucks but might give it a go.
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Weaver

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Re: After a week on a gigabit
« Reply #29 on: April 05, 2020, 02:31:46 PM »

I think I mentioned some years ago how amazed I was when my sister said she couldn’t really see much difference going from 50kbps dialup (up to 200k including MPPC compression) download to 500kbps ADSL. 10x faster and you can’t see the difference - what’s wrong with you ? I thought. But the I thought about caching and cases where you’re improving something from 50ms to 5ms; in the latter case it was just not notably slow beforehand - do you have to pick your examples carefully!

In the dialup case, a many things had had a lot of design effort and tuning put into them over years, and these mitigations had clearly done a really good job. Nowadays web designers are not forced at gunpoint to live for a week in a slow dialup network so that they will sympathise with users who have slow links (maybe not dialup but slowness has not gone away). This will stop the web designers from requiring us to wait forever and waste our money fetching massive hires background bitmap.

Somehow we need a way of allowing website visitors to be able to choose speed/quality/cost options when browsing the web. I don’t know how that would work without being a total pain. Anyone any ideas?

The only thing I can think of would be to get the browser to expose something; publishing an "I’m paying for download (or download+upload)" flag as well would be very, very helpful, for use in say 3G/4G. Another reason to alert the considerate adaptive webserver as well as just slow browsers: “minimise byte-count”. For example: iOS now knows about internet connections that cost money per byte of download(+upload [?]) such as mobile data. I wish iOS could be told about cheap rate iMessage of day though
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