Is there a way to make applications behave on really slow internet?
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I remember times when 57600 bits/second was considered fast. Usually you could get stable-ish internets on 33600 or even 19200. The internets, though, were mostly browseable.
Then there was GPRS. If you had EDGE, you were lucky. And stuff worked. Mostly. You could use maps, you could browse the interwebs, you could look at the pictures of ladies if you had enough patience. It was slow, but it was usable.
Now most phone applications lose their shit altogether on GPRS/EDGE and crawl on HSDPA. HS in which stands for "High Speed", and which is 3.2 Mbps in the case, and 7.8 Mbps if it's HSPA+.
My cell operator has an "unlimited" Internet offering wherein you get your unlimited 3 gigabytes, and then it's still "free" but the speed on 3G is dropped to 64 kbit/s. (5 Mbit/s on LTE, but that's not the point.) When I use my data cap up and go into 3G-only zone, the apps lose their shit, although the 64 kbit/s is not exactly "slow" in my books. I start getting timeouts all over the place, with websites too.
I really wish those app developers for once to have 64 kbits/s shared office-wide, go mad, eat shit, and suffer.
But anyway: is there a way to make websites and almost everything else not time out like crazy when the link is slowed down?
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@wft Oh, it's your phone with this problem.
Set up a caching proxy and get your phone to use it? Maybe using a second phone on a different account, if you actually want network locality. In other words, no.
Set up a content-stripping proxy and get your phone to use it? This might actually help. What content to strip, well...
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Back in those days, styles were inline or absent, and if there were images at all they'd be down-scaled to 'web resolution' which was to the tune of 320x240 pixels. With high JPEG compression added of course.
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@wft also note that the quality of 3G infrastructure itself has deteriorated since LTE became a standard. Dunno if it's due to planned obsolescence, repurposing bandwidth, or simply higher load, but if you've got identical phone as 10 years ago, and tried to open identical webpage as 10 years ago, it'd still work worse than 10 years ago.
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@Gribnit Well, computering will suffer too if I tether that connection.
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@PleegWat so image-scaling proxy? Text proxy? Oh. Yeah, huh.
@wft, you see that text browser wtf that crossed this site lately-ish? It's primarily a proxy. Force everything into that. Dunno what it does about videos...
Can you deal with image downscaling? That'd cut the usage. A reducing proxy is about it for cutting the data over the wire. Caching doesn't really help cos the phone still retrieves it.
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@Gąska As I understand, a lot of bandwidth used for 3G and higher protocols gets repurposed. However particularly 2.5G (gprs) remains in use, since many appliances use 2.5G. This includes things like the live traffic function for your discrete satnav device.
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@Gąska That's probably the cause. Note that on 3G it's not speed as such, it's the latency that sucks ass. The packets burst at a speed that hints that you have HSPA+ with 7.2 Mbit/s, but the latency between them is unbearably high.
Also, I've heard tales that people were using VoIP on EDGE (which theoretically should be possible, GSM codec is 8kbit/s, and there are a couple similar ones). I've tried it in Przemyśl back in 2012, where T-Mobile didn't have good 3G coverage at the time, and only the SIP part worked, the actual voice transmission got stuck.
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@Gribnit I'm going to actually write a program to scrape the bits off the news sites I care about, make an ebook of them, and send them to my Kindle, so I can have a proper content consumption routine with my morning coffee. No popups, no javascripts, no fucking ads, no videos, just pure plaintext pleasure.
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Well. Speedtest says my download speed is 0.79 Mbps. Upload is something around the carrier pigeon speed... And 1300 ms jitter. That's 3G.
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@wft that's even proxier than a proxy. that's the proxiest.
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@wft said in Is there a way to make applications behave on really slow internet?:
Speedtest says
Google seemed to work alright. It seems a bit more reliable providing kinda-real-world performance expectations
So I tried Speedtest for comparison:
So far so good...
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@wft On mobile, I use Opera as a browser, and it has a mode (can't remember the name) where all data goes through Opera's servers and gets compressed before being actually sent to you. It's the only browser I use so I don't really know how much better it is (or isn't) than a standard browser, and of course it means all of your data transits by Opera's servers, but it does seem to work fairly well. Maybe that would help in your case?
(of course it doesn't help at all for all other apps)
Also, you could make a whole rant thread about this...
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@remi opera turbo, or something like that. Chrome on android also has a 'data saver' mode
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@remi since the beginning of War On Unsecure HTTP Connections that made SSL ubiquitous, Opera Turbo has lost most of its utility, because it's unable to compress encrypted traffic.
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@Gąska Good to know. I should try another browser one day to see if I notice a difference.
Does that apply to pictures as well? I know that Opera Turbo compresses them (there is a setting for that, IIRC), I guess it can't find out pictures inside encrypted traffic, unless they treated differently?
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@remi said in Is there a way to make applications behave on really slow internet?:
I guess it can't find out pictures inside encrypted traffic
This.
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@remi There's a browser called Puffin which is basically Browser Citrix.
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@pie_flavor I'm sure there is some useful information in there, but to me it's gibberish. What's "Browser Citrix"?
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How about simply NoScript (on Firefox, possiblu on Chrome)?
I find that it reduces bandwidth usage by approx 50%-90%.I know, I know, you'll miss on those High-Definition advertisement contents, but, well, with that data cap, you'll just have to bear with it.
Edit:
Ah, sorry. Your problem was with apps, not internet at large. ...Uhh... disable updates? The content-caching proxy is probably going to help too.
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@remi quick google suggests this: https://www.citrix.com/digital-workspace/secure-browser.html
I don't think I want anything like that anywhere near any of the electronic devices I own. By "like that", I mean very enterprisey software aimed at very enterprisey customers, which means breaking twice a week and the access to technical support costing million bucks a month.
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Oh wow. For the longest time I was reading this as "Is there a way to make applications behave really slow on internet?"
I'd post to Off by One, but the word is shifted by two places.
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@Gąska Also, this doesn't bode well for the "slow internet" part of the initial question:
only screen updates, mouse click and keystroke commands associated with navigating the internet cross the network to reach the user’s endpoint device
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@kazitor said in Is there a way to make applications behave on really slow internet?:
Oh wow. For the longest time I was reading this as "Is there a way to make applications behave really slow on internet?"
I'd post to Off by One, but the word is shifted by two places.
You can always say you're off by one
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@remi Citrix is software for secure remote desktop. Puffin is basically a 'thin client' browser that renders a proprietary format from the Puffin servers; the servers perform page requests, parse HTML/CSS, run JS, etc., and as a bonus runs Flash for you since your phone doesn't. Webpages are never slow even over shitty connections because the data you receive is so optimized. The Android/iOS version is free because of the profit they make off of the desktop versions.
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@pie_flavor That sounds interesting, but my gut feeling is that it's unlikely to work nearly so well on Earth-47 as it does on Earth-73.
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@HardwareGeek
I stopped using it because most of my mobile browsing was WTDWTF which had some text-box issue I can't remember the details of but it was literally only NodeBB that did it. It's not perfect. But it's damn good enough.Never mind, now I remember that was patched out. I actually stopped using it because Chrome had my password store and Puffin didn't and I wanted it to just work™.
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@remi said in Is there a way to make applications behave on really slow internet?:
I guess it can't find out pictures inside encrypted traffic, unless they treated differently?
The browser can do anything it wants. It has to have all of the decrypted data in order to display it. So first and foremost, you have to trust your browser, or else you shouldn't use it. The browser is the one responsible for requesting the data in the first place, so all it has to do is modify the request to be proxied through one of Google's servers.
This is entirely possible, and it can even be done with HTTPS traffic as long as Google's server is "trusted". Proxies, filters, and network monitoring tools will sometimes require installation of a root certificate in order to monitor or intercept HTTPS traffic. Installing a root certificate to trust their server allows them to "man-in-the-middle" your HTTPS connections, and your browser will allow it because you (or someone, anyway) told it to trust their server.
If some outside party was trying to proxy your HTTPS data through an unknown remote server, that would be detected and the connection would be blocked, because the browser would see that the remote server wasn't the intended target server, and it would correctly deduce that a MITM attack was occurring. But if the remote server is already marked as trusted at the system level, then there's no problem... your browser will trust that the data from that server is secure, even though it can tell that the data's coming from a different server than it's "supposed" to come from...
And just who controls the root certificates that are installed by default on Android, hmm? That'd be Google. /tinfoil hat
Seriously though, they don't do that because of privacy reasons, not because they can't. Between Chromium being open-source and all the geeks who play with Wireshark, someone would notice if Google was silently passing HTTPS data through one of its servers, and the outcry over this would be tremendous.
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@anotherusername said in Is there a way to make applications behave on really slow internet?:
Seriously though, they don't do that because of privacy reasons, not because they can't. Between Chromium being open-source and all the geeks who play with Wireshark, someone would notice if Google was silently passing HTTPS data through one of its servers, and the outcry over this would be tremendous.
So they only do it for their mobile versions… :tinfoil_hat:
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@dkf If you're really being tinfoil hat about it, they're already doing it all at the ISP level, and nobody's the wiser about it because they have the private keys for all of the major certificate issuers.
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@anotherusername said in Is there a way to make applications behave on really slow internet?:
so all it has to do is modify the request to be proxied through one of Google's servers.
This is literally happening right now, actually. Each and every link I click on from Gmail now goes through a tracking link first. I'm pretty sure the web version does this as well...
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@wft said in Is there a way to make applications behave on really slow internet?:
Upload is something around the carrier pigeon speed...
Carrier pigeons can have extremely high throughput.
The problem is the latency. And possibly the packet drop rate as well.
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@Zecc said in Is there a way to make applications behave on really slow internet?:
Carrier pigeons can have extremely high throughput.
The problem is the latency. And possibly the packet drop rate as well.
And that other drop rate
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Is there a way to make applications behave on really slow internet?:
@Zecc said in Is there a way to make applications behave on really slow internet?:
Carrier pigeons can have extremely high throughput.
The problem is the latency. And possibly the packet drop rate as well.
And that other drop rate
Who doesn't want mob drops?
