Know more about your first enemy Latency

Today morning i posted an status msg in Facebook about network delay .. 


The speed of light has a fixed upper limit. In fibre, this is about 200,000 Km/s, and it’s about the same for electricity through copper. This means that a signal sent over a cable that runs 2754 Km from Jammu to Kanyakumari would take about 14ms to get through...




So we can calculate a round trip time would be ~ 28ms .. and this is for one cycle only.. suppose it will be happened 250 times then round trip time will be 3 sec. i think .. so you got clear idea .. how latency delay effect HTTP request and response drama :-)

French ISPs have been advertising for years about being able to reach 24Mb/s with DSL lines. Why even bother about website performance if they think everyone has 24Mb/s available?


Bandwidth is actually how much data we can transfer at once. Latency is how fast a byte of data will travel end to end (length of the road and speed of the cars).Here we are discussing about the round trip time:- the latency to travel back and forth.


Latency (round trip time) depends mainly on the distance between you and your peers.
Take that distance, divide by the speed of light, divide again by 66% (slowness of a light fiber), and multiply by two to have back and forth. Then add about 10 to 20ms for your hardware, your ISP infrastructure, and the web server hardware and network. You will have the minimal latency you may hope for (but never reach):-


Latency (round trip) = 2 x (distance) / (0.66 x speed of light) + 20ms


For example In France(France has better figures than most other countries, so please expect worse than this figures) the latency of usual DSL lines goes from 30ms (French websites and CDNs) to 60-70ms (big players in Europe).We can expect 100 to 200ms for an US website with no relay in Europe.


3G phone networks usually have an added tax of 100ms, sometimes more. VPN, bad proxies, antivirus software, badly written portals and badly set up internal networks may also noticeably
increase latency.


Big companies have their own private "serious" direct connection to Internet. They also often have (at least in France) networks with filtering firewalls, complex architecture between the head office and branch offices, and sometimes overloaded switches and routers. You can expect an added tax of 50ms to 250ms compared to a simple DSL line.


So 50ms is really small, so latency isn’t so important, is it??


Round trip time is a primary concern.Mostly, your browser waits; it waits because of the latency.
When you do a request, you have to wait a few milliseconds to let the server generate the response, but also a few to have your request and its response travel back and forth. Each time you perform a request, you will have to wait one round trip time.


Suppose an website home page required 250 requests and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 has two parallel download queues, so that’s 125 requests each. With a standard round trip time of 60ms we will be assured to wait at least 7.5 seconds before the page fully loads.Then we have to add the time needed to download and process the files themselves.


It's All about TCP Game ??


TCP is the protocol we use to connect to a web server and then send it our request. It’s like when you’re chatting on the phone: you never directly tell what you plan to tell, you first say "hello", wait for your peer to say "hello", then ask an academic "what’s up?" and wait for an answer (that you probably won’t even listen to but you will wait for it anyway). In Internet’s life, this courtesy is named TCP.TCP sends a "SYN" in place of "hello", and gets a "SYN-ACK" back, as an answer. The more latency you have, the more this initialization will take time.


DNS before TCP ??


That’s not all. Beforesaying “hello” to your friend on the phone, you have to dial his phone number. For internet it’s the IP address. Either your browser performed a request to the same domain a few seconds before and it may reuse the same result, or it has to perform a DNS request. This request may be in your ISP cache (cheap) or needs to be sent to a distant server (expensive if the domain name server is far away).


For each TCP connection, you will have to wait again, a time depending on the latency: latency to your ISP if you find a result on your ISP cache, latency to the DNS if not.


No !! IT's not end .. meet with UDP protocol :-)


DNS often uses the UDP protocol. UDP is a simple “quick and cheap” request/response protocol, with no need to establish a connection before like TCP has. However, when the response that weight over 512 bytes, it may either send a larger response (EDNS specification) or ask for TCP. Large DNS responses used to be rare in the past, but now DNS uses a security extension (DNSSEC) that requires larger responses.


The problem is that many badly configured firewalls still block DNS responses of more than 512 bytes. A few others will block the UDP fragmentation needed for response of more than 1.5KB (UDP fragmentation is a way to send the response with multiple UDP packets, as each one is limited in size). For short: You may well have UDP DNS requests first then a fallback to TCP.


If that happens, the client first requests in UDP, the server answers “please go on TCP”, client opens a TCP connection (SYN + SYN-ACK) and then asks again. In place of one round trip time, we now have three.


Finally ??


A simple 10KB image will need 3 round trips. jQuery (77KB) will need 7 round trips. At 60 to 100ms the round trip time, it is easy to understand that latency is far more important than anything else.
So we have seen that how how slow start and congestion control affect the throughput of a network connection. Each network roundtrip is limited by how long it takes photons or electrons to get through, and anything we can do to reduce the number of roundtrips should reduce total page download time, right? Well, it may not be that simple. We only really care about roundtrips that run end-to-end.Latency has been a problem whenever signals have had to be transmitted over a distance. Whether it is a rider on a horse, or electrons running through metal, each has had its own problems with it.