Left a comment on the Official Netflix blog:
What I have always liked about Netflix is that it was a one-stop shop that knew what kind of movies I like to watch, and could make smart suggestions. Netflix had a huge selection and could send me just about any movie I could want. The streaming was a nice addition, but you lose a lot of control that you have on the DVDs like selecting aspect ratios or subtitles. Sometimes the instant gratification is nice but what was important wasn’t a red envelope versus a streaming video, it was that one way or another, Netflix would get me movies I wanted to see.
Then you decided that what I really wanted had little to do with movies or brand loyalty and everything to do with having a medium preference shoved down my throat.
If the streaming is such a fundamentally new business model start a new business and be done with it. Call it Streamstr. Partner with old-fogey Netflix and their stupid red envelopes so their retarded users can stream a few videos. Better yet, be the Netflix I knew and loved so many years: deliver movies I want to me. If I have to pay more for postage or more for some streaming movie that is really “hot” that is totally cool.
But what you are doing right now is some sort of bizarre unsettling brand seppuku. Why is such a great company working so hard to come up with new and innovative ways to scare away its loyal customers?
Netflix used to be about people watching movies. End of story. Movies. Movies. Movies. Its not about picking the winner between VHS and Beta, its about your customers and their love of movies and about your love of getting the movies to your customers. No nonsense, no bull, no false choices. And now? You’re tossing that advantage aside, and I am just as well served by your competitors.
Making the experience more complex for your customers is just plain dumb. =(
Good luck with your brave new spin-off model. It was a nice ride while it lasted.
-danny
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I heard a squirrel clomping up a tree. I looked and looked and couldn’t find him. But then I saw Maxwell was climbing higher than I had ever seen him climb.  He climbed as high as the second floor, hoping to sneak up on the Mourning Doves. The doves were wise to his approach, but he ascended and descended safely.
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Tenth anniversary of the attacks. A bit difficult to recite the Pledge of Allegiance with that knot that still forms in the back of the throat.
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While diagnosing why an internal web site is slow for some users, I got data that our overseas colleagues see ping latency to the web site of around 200 ms. This is not unreasonable. Some web sites that attach a lot of additional objects cause remote clients to have to open several connections and make several round-trips to load and render a web page. What might work fine at 20 ms latency can really drag at 200 ms.
How to test this out? As a Linux user, I can use netem to induce added latency on my network interface:
# ping -qc 2 google.com
PING google.com (74.125.224.145) 56(84) bytes of data.
--- google.com ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 5009ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 4.136/4.197/4.258/0.061 ms
# tc qdisc add dev wlan0 root netem delay 200ms
# ping -qc 2 google.com
PING google.com (74.125.224.144) 56(84) bytes of data.
--- google.com ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 5474ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 205.006/205.034/205.062/0.028 ms
# tc qdisc change dev wlan0 root netem delay 0ms
# ping -qc 2 google.com
PING google.com (74.125.224.50) 56(84) bytes of data.
--- google.com ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 5011ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 4.117/4.182/4.248/0.092 ms
Note, I’m on wireless, so I’m tuning wlan0. you’ll want to hit eth0 or whatever is appropriate to your configuration.
The YSlow plugin or the Google Chrome Developer tool Network tab can be helpful to see what is going on:
Google Chrome's Developer Tool Network view without extra latency.
Google Chrome's Developer Tool Network view with extra 200ms latency.
So, with my web site, an added 200 ms latency doubles total page load time from 0.8 seconds to 1.6 seconds.
Here’s what I see when I visit the problem web site:
A problem web site at normal latency.
A problem web site at additional 200ms latency.
Total page load time at 7.5 seconds is nearly three times slower than without latency.
A very crude way to measure things is with wget on the command-line.
The wget man page mentions the -p (page requisites) option, then the author suggests wget -E -H -k -K -p <URL>. (You’ll need to RTFM yourself…) So I do:
$ cd /tmp
$ sudo tc qdisc change dev wlan0 root netem delay 0ms
$ time wget -q -E -H -k -K -p http://google.com
real 0m0.160s
user 0m0.010s
sys 0m0.000s
$ sudo tc qdisc change dev wlan0 root netem delay 200ms
$ time wget -q -E -H -k -K -p http://google.com
real 0m3.832s
user 0m0.010s
sys 0m0.000s
Of course, even with all those options, wget behaves very differently from a modern GUI web browser: there’s no caching, it doesn’t parse the DOM and it will blindly download requisites it doesn’t actually need. (Even a large font file found in a CSS comment.) And it does all its requests serially, whereas a modern GUI web browser will fetch several objects in parallel. And whatever web browser you use over a connection with induced latency is not going to replicate the experience of remote users pulling page requisites from zippy local CDNs.
At the end of the day, I proposed the following advice to my remote colleagues:
- Try tuning the web browser to use more concurrent TCP connections.
- Try modifying browser behavior: middle-click faster-loading sub-pages in to new tabs, work on those tabs, then refer back to the slower-loading “dashboard” screen, reloading only when needed.
I also tweaked the web application to make it possible to show a more lightweight “dashboard” screen with fewer objects hanging off of it. This seems to improve load time on that page about 50%.
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I am flying Virgin but this scene of silver-cylindered beauties struck my fancy.
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Lake Point Tower rising majestically from the trees. Mei-Lin sais she thinks Oprah lives there, has four floors to herself. She doesn’t like to feel crowded, I guess.
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My camera is dead so it is all about the Android phone now. This is Maggie, played with in PicSay Pro.
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Weekends when the wife is not around I enjoy a visit to my favorite coffee shop. On this occasion while one patron was transcribing musical notation another regular started to work on the math of an idea about solar power generation.
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Monday afternoon I biked down the Guadalupe trail past the airport to San Jose Diridon Caltrain and rode a comfy baby bullet home to Mountain View.
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