What causes variations in download speed based on the size of the file?
What is the explanation for this phenomenon? (taken from https://speed.cloudflare.com)
It's interesting because it means that upon visiting a website, we download its assets in a far slower speed than our network is capable of.
That's because most HTML files, stylesheets and scripts weigh less than 200kb.
4 Replies
most of the time spent downloading tiny files would be latency rather than raw transfer speed
i.e. a higher % of the total transfer time is spent waiting for and establishing a connection rather than actually transferring data
I see, so the data we see above does not only include the raw download speed.
Thanks!
it would reflect impact to real world performance though, if you have higher latency to your small assets then they're going to load a lot slower. whereas for large assets the added latency will not make a difference
incidentally this is one reason CDNs are popular for speeding up websites, because those small assets are cached in global locations that have a lower latency to the user
Makes sense 👌