I had to deal with the DS-160 multiple times over the year. I don't think you give justice to how bad this website really is. I have started to notice that these "timeouts" are very random. At the worst times, the session "times out" immediately after login.

These random logouts happens more frequently during certain times of the day and seems to follow a semi-predictable pattern. It is almost certainly tied to system load in some way.

Also, the site's HTML and JavaScript are bloated beyond hope for what should be a fairly simple set of web forms. And itnhas been thisnway since at least 2018 with exactly zero improvements.

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qingcharles 2 days ago | parent [-]

One thing a developer sat in DC or SV with a 5G iPhone 16 doesn't realize too, is that if you are visiting these web sites with a phone plan that has a tiny monthly data allowance then this bloat can blow out an entire month in one sitting.

I worked with people on parole that were given free phones to use for job applications, finding their way around etc, and they would only get 3GB data a month. Some of the sites they visited were dropping 250MB of payload on the home page. You'd get some plans that would drop down to 2G, but try using that for Google Maps when you're trying to find a bus to get you across the city.

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Dylan16807 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> You'd get some plans that would drop down to 2G, but try using that for Google Maps when you're trying to find a bus to get you across the city.

Sure, I'll do my best to try it. I'll approximate the throttle by limiting chrome to 128kbps, 500ms delay, and 5% packet loss for fun.

With a fresh incognito session, google responds to "here to 4th street" in 10 seconds, and when I click to open maps it needs just under two minutes to load. Then I can click on the transit option and it needs another 10 seconds to update.

Not too bad for a cold cache. If I do it again with a hot cache it only takes 20 seconds to go through the whole process. And I expect the app to be similar to the hot cache situation. Even with 64kbps I'd expect reasonable results. Do any cell providers throttle worse than that?

I agree with your argument about bloat in general, but google in particular has a lot of good engineering resources and tries to work well on bad connections.

Also I would be in favor of some spectrum licensing rules that say you can't throttle below 1Mbps...

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qingcharles a day ago | parent [-]

The paper stats on 2G would make it seem like it should work in theory, especially if it's using EDGE or something, but it just consistently fails in the field. You'll get partial renders and then it will jam up. It's super, super frustrating to use. Because it is slow to render people start trying to swipe around the map to make it do something and that just cancels all the async downloads and restarts them.

There are probably a host of other telemetry things going on in your standard $20 Android handset in the background too, eating up all that bandwidth and causing all sorts of bottlenecks.

Agree it would be really nice to have some sane minimum speed.

	▲	Dylan16807 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Well it's not ever going to be actual 2G. It's a throttle. I'm not sure how much worse it could get when you have a reasonably solid signal, but I guess nothing stops network engineers from doing something awful. > Because it is slow to render people start trying to swipe around the map to make it do something At a certain point it's the user's fault. And once it gets to the point where you can swipe around, the tile loading should be pretty visible. And to add more emphasis to the app being usable, I can get driving directions fully offline, then click bus and now it needs one tiny server request to tell me.

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2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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