have you ever been driving around at rush hour and seen an incredibly
expensive supercar wondering to yourself what is the point
of buying a high-performance six-figure vehicle if you can only go a few miles
an hour during the evening commute well that actually tends to happen a lot
here in vancouver but no matter where you live this is probably how you feel
if you've ever had a fast internet connection yet your favorite website
still often takes a long time to load so in this age of gigabit fiber service 4k
video streaming and massively multiplayer online games why are we
still so often waiting around for pages that might only consist of text and
images to hit our screens well ultimately most issues that cause pages
to load slowly can be classified as some form of latency a concept we've talked
about quite a few times here on techwiki simply put latency is the delay between
an input and the corresponding action something you've probably noticed if
you've ever tried to watch a video with an out of sync bluetooth speaker but
when it comes to loading websites latency is often caused by something
either server side or on your own end that needs to be handled independently
of your 100 megabit internet connection thus creating a bottleneck you might not
be able to avoid no matter how fast your connection is
one frequent culprit is a page that relies heavily on scripts such as
javascript that require additional processing by your device you see with a
reasonably fast connection it doesn't take long for a browser to understand a
command to load up some text or images and place them in the appropriate spots
on your screen however web page scripts are almost like little programs that
your computer has to run in addition to loading the page's actual content
meaning additional time is often required to process them scripts are
responsible for handling certain interactive elements of web pages but
perhaps unsurprisingly many of them are put there for advertising purposes ad
scripts both fetch ads to place on web pages and send information back to ad
servers to keep track of analytics and user browsing habits so a marketer
tracking the embarrassing music that you might like to listen to could be behind
your favorite site loading slowly or responding slowly when you try to click
on something but even if you're loading up a site that's mostly free of big
clunky scripts a page can still be written poorly asking the browser to
make tons of requests for different elements like scripts and images aside
from the intricacies of how web pages are written another frequent source of
frustration is ping the time it takes for a packet to leave your computer
reach the server and the response to be returned to you packets used to measure
ping time are very small just a few dozen bytes so ping time really is not
dependent on how many megabits per second your isp is offering it's better
to think of high ping time as another form of latency that's usually caused by
a server being very far away because even though the electrical impulses that
carry information over the internet travel at incredibly fast speeds they
still take time to reach servers and if you're sitting in los angeles trying to
access a server in london that amount of time is going to be
noticeable any ping above about 100 milliseconds
will probably cause web browsing to feel at least a little bit slower thanks to
the additional delay caused by these vast distances and although this video
is about why websites load slowly this is also part of the reason why gamers
prefer servers that are geographically closer to them as a ping higher than
just 50 milliseconds can cause lag due
to the real-time nature of many games but back to websites are there any ways
that developers can get around slow loading times well yeah both by coding
their pages efficiently to cut down on how much work your browser has to do and
by caching frequently accessed data through schemes like amp which you can
learn about more in this video with these best practices developers can make
your life a little bit easier and that's important as a recent survey indicated
that 40 of users give up if a website
takes just just three seconds or more to load
given how impatient many of us are these days i'd hate to be the developer who
got can because their website wasn't loading fast enough
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forward slash Techquickie so thanks for watching guys if you like this video
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