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.

Erisa•8/29/24, 12:37 PM

most of the time spent downloading tiny files would be latency rather than raw transfer speed

Erisa•8/29/24, 12:38 PM

i.e. a higher % of the total transfer time is spent waiting for and establishing a connection rather than actually transferring data

TheNinthSkyOP•8/29/24, 12:42 PM

I see, so the data we see above does not only include the raw download speed.
Thanks!

Erisa•8/29/24, 12:44 PM

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

Erisa•8/29/24, 12:45 PM

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

TheNinthSkyOP•8/29/24, 12:46 PM

Makes sense