Top all-time · #2870
Stuart Cheshire
Personal blog · stuartcheshire.orgsystemsprogramming
Stuart Cheshire's personal blog at stuartcheshire.org covers systems and programming. Since 2010, 27 different Hacker News readers have linked it 30 times, most often “It's the Latency, Stupid (1996)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (19) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Stuart Cheshire's writings on network latency, bandwidth, TCP and Nagle's algorithm, including the 1996 'It's the Latency, Stupid' rant. HN readers cite them to explain why latency matters more than bandwidth.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 19 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- It's the Latency, Stupid (1996)8 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2016-09-21
- TCP Performance problems related to Nagle’s Algorithm and Delayed ACK (2005)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-06-22
- It's the Latency, Stupid3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-01-09
- /papers/LatencyQuest.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-09-13
What Hacker News says?
I may get flamed for pointing this out either by people who are offended by the viewpoint, or by those who find it so bleeding obvious as to not be worth stating, but those page hangs (and I know exactly what you mean) are really down to poorly architected and implemented front-ends rather than an inherent flaw with JavaScript-heavy apps and pages. Any time you do an XHR you can supply both a success and a failure c…
Comment linking /rants/latency.html
on “The web sucks if you have a slow connection”Submitted TCP Performance problems related to Nagle’s Algorithm and Delayed ACK (2005) as a story · 133 points
HN discussionDon't forget the impact of network. I managed to get a several hundred times performance improvement on one occasion because I found a distributed query that was pulling back roughly 1M rows over the network and then doing a join that dropped all but 5 - 10 of them. I restructured the query so the join occurred on the remote server and only 5 - 10 rows were sent over the network and, boom, suddenly it's fast. There'…
Comment linking /rants/latency.html
on “Beating NumPy matrix multiplication in 150 lines of C”Submitted Consistent Overhead Byte Stuffing (1999) [pdf] as a story · 38 points
HN discussionForgive my ignorance as I'm a software engineer and not a physicist. But does this means that in the future FTL communication will be possible. Every time I work with networking one thing always springs to mind. That is that the speed of light is a limiting factor. Will this mean that in the future latency issues will be a thing of the past? http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html
Comment linking /rants/latency.html
on “Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilometres”Submitted Latency and the Quest for Interactivity (1996) [pdf] as a story · 31 points
HN discussionThat might be because Mac OS X implements modified Nagle's algorithm as mentioned here at the bottom: http://www.stuartcheshire.org/papers/NagleDelayedAck/
Comment linking /papers/NagleDelayedAck/
on “How a little bit of TCP knowledge is essential”Submitted It's the Latency, Stupid as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThat was one of the original goals of Zeroconf. In 2002, Stuart Cheshire said [1]: > My hope is that in the future — distant future perhaps — your computer will only need one wired communication technology. It will provide power on the connector like USB and FireWire, so it can power small peripheral devices. It will use IP packets like Ethernet, so it provides your wide-area communications for things like email and…
Comment linking /TheIdeaBasket.html
on “USB 3.2 is going to make the current USB branding even worse”Submitted It's the Latency, Stupid (1996) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf only we can get Stuart Cheshire ( http://www.stuartcheshire.org ) to give up Bolo! http://www.bolo.net and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(1987_video_game)
Comment linking /
on “Glider, Mac Classic game, open-sourced”Submitted TCP Performance problems caused by interaction between Nagle and Delayed ACK as a story · 3 points
HN discussionPreviously: It's The Latency, Stupid: http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html
Comment linking /rants/latency.html
on “You Don’t Know Jack about Bandwidth”Submitted It's the Latency, Stupid as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI loved Bolo. http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html makes a reference to how it worked under the hood. It turns out that it didn't take a lot of home modems in the game to make the game unusable.
Comment linking /rants/latency.html
on “The Rise and Fall of Ambrosia Software (2019)”Submitted TCP Performance Problems Related to Nagle's Algorithm and Delayed ACK (2005) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThese days I think circuit switching means virtual circuits with guaranteed bandwidth at each hop. Even the phone network used FDM/TDM for circuits, not separate wires. Anyway, circuits are more expensive than just running a packet-switched network lightly loaded. See http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/Networkdynamics.html and https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/network.utilizati...
Comment linking /rants/Networkdynamics.html
on “End-to-end congestion control cannot avoid latency spikes (2022)”Submitted It's the Latency, Stupid (1996) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionPoor hardware. http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/Latency.html
Comment linking /rants/Latency.html
on “False Start: Google proposal reduces SSL handshake to single round-trip”Submitted Nagle’s Algorithm and Delayed ACK as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis guy wrote one of my all-time favorite papers for its elegant solution to a common problem: http://www.stuartcheshire.org/papers/COBSforSIGCOMM.ps
Comment linking /papers/COBSforSIGCOMM.ps
on “It's the Latency, Stupid”Submitted TCP Performance problems with conflicting regulation algorithms as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSee Stuart Cheshire's ""Latency and the Quest for Interactivity", from way back in 1996: http://www.stuartcheshire.org/papers/LatencyQuest.html
Comment linking /papers/LatencyQuest.html
on “Ask HN: Can there be a true real-time collaboration over any distance on earth?”A related issue from several years ago that makes for an interesting read: http://stuartcheshire.org/papers/NagleDelayedAck/
Comment linking /papers/NagleDelayedAck/
on “OS X is holding back the 2013 MacBook Air’s 802.11ac Wi-Fi speeds”Rule of thumb for human-perceived "instantaneous" interactivity: 100,000,000 ns (100 ms) [1] A good metric to compare those numbers against. [1] http://www.stuartcheshire.org/papers/LatencyQuest.html
Comment linking /papers/LatencyQuest.html
on “Visualizing Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know”That reminds me of this classic 1990s internet description http://stuartcheshire.org/rants/InfoHighway.html
Comment linking /rants/InfoHighway.html
on “Why HTTP/3 is eating the world”Don't forget that bandwidth is only half (and most of time not the important half) of the story. Latency and packet losses usually have much stronger effect on website performance (see this classic paper http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/Latency.html or any of velocity 2010 videos). There are a couple of free and commercial products that enable you to emulate latency, packet loss and bandwidth at the same time, ju…
Comment linking /rants/Latency.html
on “Simulate Slow Internet Connection while Testing your Apps”The article fails to distinguish between hard real-time and soft real-time. If you're controlling a bandsaw, you've got a hard real-time application. You can't miss your window for the next instruction. Most user interfaces are soft real-time. Occasionally missing your window is fine. And so it is OK to do things like hash lookups whose average performance is O(1), and whose worst case performance is O(n). Ditto for…
Comment linking /rants/latency.html
on “Most UI Applications Are Broken Real-Time Applications”Yes, it's enough. Poor performance will come from things like poorly constructed websites (too much JS, very chatty sites and apps loading resources across many domains, or calling home a lot, especially with limited upstream bandwidth), contention with other users of the connection, and latency (not often a big issue with wired connections). On latency, this piece from 1996 is still worth a read: http://www.stuartc…
Comment linking /rants/latency.html
on “Ask HN: Is 10mbps good enough in today's world?”At the risk of stating the obvious, I want to add a quote that I found very informative > If you're given the choice between a low bandwidth private connection, or a small share of a larger bandwidth connection, take the small share. From http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html
Comment linking /rants/latency.html
on “Comcast, Centurylink Fail to Derail Utah Community-Owned Gigabit Fiber Network”
