Re: detecting connection speed

On Thu, 05 Dec 2013 11:11:16 +0100, James Graham <james@hoppipolla.co.uk>  
wrote:

> On 04/12/13 19:44, Aaron Heady (BING AVAILABILITY) wrote:
>
>> In my experience, determining it on a per request basis just has too
>> much variance. Maybe if the UA kept its own set of statistics on a
>> per origin IP + current default gateway basis and knew that it was
>> generally good or bad for a given connection pair then it could pass
>> that hint along, maybe include a confidence hint with it (fast last
>> 99 of 100 connections). If that mobile device thinks it is always
>> fast to an IP given its current proxy, then it most likely is.
>
> So, I don't know exactly how it worked but Opera trie[s|d] to do  
> something like this to hint at when the "turbo" compression feature  
> should be enabled. In my experience it wasn't exactly reliable; I don't  
> think I was alone in getting the "slow connection" popup when I knew  
> perfectly well that I wasn't on a slow connection at all.

We do something similar with Turbo, using our own code for deciding when  
to apply it. This is a use case for a browser.

A more generalised version may be a site (e.g. single-page app, although  
it also applies to multi-page) that stays open a "long time" and downloads  
a number of resources during that time. Somewhat like the responsive  
images use cases, there may be multiple resources that can be offered, and  
the expected speed of a connection is a determining factor for the server  
to choose the most appropriate version of given resources.

The obvious question is whether anyone can share a real and concrete  
version of that use case - making up theoretical problems is easy, but…

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
       chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Thursday, 5 December 2013 10:43:38 UTC