Gregory Szorc's blog

The Internet is Getting Slower

As time goes by, I'm noticing that my reliable non-hyperthreading 2.26GHz Pentium 4 is no longer cutting it. I have been extremely satisfied with this machine, especially considering it is five years old and is running reliably on the original hardware with only upgrades in storage capacity (160 GB total to ~700) and memory (512 MB to 1 GB). From the spring of 2004 through December 2006, I ran Gentoo Linux exclusively. After graduating college last December, I finally had time to relax, so I reinstalled Windows XP and dual-booted so I could play games for the first time in over two years.

When I was doing performance tuning on my work-issued laptop and my desktop at home, I noticed that the laptop was significantly faster. That was a very depressing moment. A few months later, I was issued a new laptop, which is noticeably faster with everything compared to my aging desktop.

To my surprise, one of the tasks where the new laptop outshines my desktop is surfing the web. I am surprised because people have been saying for years (I remember hearing it before my desktop was assembled in the summer of 2002) that computers today are fast enough for commonday tasks and you will never need a faster computer for these. Of course, surfing the internet and word processing are at the top of those lists.

Yet, surfing the web is definitely faster on newer computers. What gives?

I have identified a few causes. First, web browsers are getting more complex and thus take more cycles to perform common tasks. Recently, there have been complaints that the once-lean Firefox browser is becoming bloated and slow. On my dated desktop, I can definitely say I've noticed a slowdown from version 1 to version 2. Second, web pages are getting more complicated. Web pages used to be composed of statically rendered content with simple designs. With the explosion of AJAX, we now have pages that require client-side script execution before rendering. With socially-based sites, we have pages with hundreds of HTML containers for comments, lists, etc. Many of these can be resized, hidden, etc. These are nice and all, but it really slows down the browser!

On my dated desktop, sites with advanced user interfaces are barely usable. GMail performs like a slug compared to using it on a new computer. Sites with lots of comments, like Digg, take forever to simply render. The sites that have not opted to partake in the Javascript /AJAX explosion are a little better off, but they have still slowed a bit (probably attributable to browsers themselves becoming slower). Sites like Slashdot, which don't use Javascript for every comment, are faster than their "Web 2.0" counterparts, like Digg. It is worth noting that my experience is identical on both Linux and Windows XP on the same computer. Firefox is slow under both. IE performs about the same as Firefox. Thankfully, the Konqueror browser (the KHTML rendering engine is what powers Safari), has managed to remain pretty quick despite the performance setbacks of its competitors. Actually, I am finding myself using Konqueror more and more because it is noticeably quicker on my older hardware.

I realize that there is a little I can do to combat the situation other than buy new hardware. Sadly, it shouldn't come to this. HTML and JavaScript as technologies haven't changed much over the past few years. However, the quantity used in web pages has. I don't see web developers returning to minimalistic web page design soon, so I guess all of us with older computers are just stuck. All of this in the name of progress.

You can ping this entry by using http://blog.case.edu/gps10/mt-tb.cgi/14659 .

But speeds in Chennai are increasing. ALL users in chennai were freely upgraded from 512Kbps to 2MBPS starting this year.

But speeds in Chennai are increasing. ALL users in chennai were freely upgraded from 512Kbps to 2MBPS starting this year.

yeah the thing is as new software gets released things need to get faster to support it.