Slow Internet

Most of my boyhood was spent in rural France. I never had the joy to experience high-speed Internet until I entered college. 24 hours to download a video game? Sure did. This is how I learned the meaning of the word patience, and why I’m qualified to understand how it feels to deal with slow web interfaces.

What’s a slow Internet connection anyway? It’s not that bits are slower to move from one location to another, but that the carrying capacity of the network is different. To give you an analogy, it’s like delivering food from A to B with two Ferraris: they are both really fast, but in a slow network you are carrying the food in your arms, whereas in a fiber network you attached a car carrier trailer to the back. Consequently, you will deliver a high quantity of food much faster in the latter case.

It’s the same principle to take into account when building services for the slow Internet: the amount of time you spend loading the car and the size of the order are the only metrics you have to work on.

In other words, what you want is a car that’s ready to go as soon as an order comes up, and whose load is as small as possible.

This is why static-generated websites, which are generated at build time and thus pre-rendered in advance before users even ask for it, will always be much faster than websites dynamically put together at runtime.

This is also why you have to be extra careful about the weight of your webpages: adding an extra picture can look great, but it’s not mandatory if it prevents useful information from being displayed fast.