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Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

From the demo I saw, it worked as well as watching 1080p YouTube in a third world country. Someone figured it was smart to do server-side rendering and load your document as tiles using a technology designed for maps (the same as used in OpenStreetMap, and there it works well, because that's actually a map and not a document). The person argued WiFi was bad, but when typing on a 100mbps symmetric connection there was still a noticeable delay between my keystroke and it appearing on screen.

Edit: to everyone saying they also can't watch YouTube 1080p without lag/buffering/whatever: perhaps it's not perfect anywhere outside the third world, but I could imagine that there it would suck even more. It's just a comparison, not a research paper.

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I suspect that latency can be reduced significantly by limiting tile sizes. They currently use 256x256 tiles, forcing a new tile transfer every time a mutating user action takes place (e.g. a new character typed). A one-size-fits-all tile is unlikely to satisfy users of varying bandwidth and latency tolerance.

Of course, further steps can be taken as well, such as adaptive resolution and client-side rendering extrapolation. Personally I commend them on a bold strategy. At the very least, they will have contributed to the body of alternative web application architecture patterns.

I get the feeling that if continued in that direction it will be mostly a poor VNC clone.

I regularly use Microsoft Remote Desktop in full color mode over 3G from the UK against a machine hosted outside Paris, as an example of what's possible given enough effort, RDP is a bastion of pure awesomeness. I have on many occasions failed to notice I'm running gvim on the remote box compared to a local VM on my laptop. In full screen mode they're practically indiscernible if you aren't paying attention to the latency of your keystrokes. It's impressive enough that on a high bandwidth low latency connection, even small YouTube videos play well.

RDP is heavily integrated into the OS, I'm not sure where it derives its advantage, but for example, dragging a window across the desktop (requiring massive region dirtying) is somehow almost flawless. For example it might be quite an easy affair to delegate compositing and blending to the client, such that the client has a full copy of the bitmaps being dragged around the screen. VNC is intentionally stupid by design and nothing like that (it hails from an era when a microcontroller was preferable for cost reasons compared to a computer in some hypothetical X terminal design - remember VNC is from the 90s).

There is a ton of stuff Libreoffice can do this in this department to produce a compelling solution, alpha quality "release early release often" editions shouldn't be used to form a long term judgement, especially when examples of better implementations already exist, and there is real money on the table to motivate further innovation.

RDP doesn't have to be heavily integrated into the OS. VirtualBox uses RDP for remote display of guests regardless of OS [0]. There are a number of servers for Linux that implement RDP.

[0] https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch07.html

Yes, RDP is almost certainly a perfect superset of the VNC model -- unless VirtualBox's graphics drivers do tons of magic, chances are high that all its RDP server has to work with is a constantly changing bitmap to send differences for. AFAIK (and from anecdotal experience) Windows RDP beats that by a long shot (e.g. can preserve the semantics of Bitblt GDI calls and suchlike)

Seems to use ~100KiB/s doing normal editing stuff in Writer. Doesn't seem like that's going to scale very well to a whole office typing away?

It's pretty unpleasant to use for me too over an ordinary office internet connection: there's noticeable lag for simple UI actions, and there are image compression artefacts when things change quickly on screen.

This also means that it is expensive to run this service, you can only do so much server side rendering per server, much much less than you can response to REST API calls with a little bit of JSON data as both Google Docs (and our service http://Clara.io do.)

This ownCloud service is bound to stay smallish until they embrace a true client side rendering approach.

> This also means that it is expensive to run this service, you can only do so much server side rendering per server,

Of course there is a limit but for the personal use it should not be a issue, for the enterprise use it still should not be issue because it has caching mechanism and server only renders changing tiles, and a 16 core machine easily can handle hundreds of simultaneous users which is cheaper to operate than buying license for the any other office suite per user and employing a IT worker to install that office suites and maintain company wide document sharing.

> This ownCloud service is bound to stay smallish until they embrace a true client side rendering approach.

there is already client side rendering solution in ownCloud called Documents and uses webodf, but it only satisfactory for the simple needs.

> implying that watching youtube in 1080p is not easier in third world countries compared to first world... (looking at you Europe).

Why, it's really fast in Europe: "Sorry, this video is not available in your country" loads impressively efficiently.

I though Europe had much better access to fast and cheap Internet compared to USA? Lowest offering from my ISP is 100/10 for around $16. No problems with HD video. Especially not with Youtube's interpretation of HD.

I don't know about USA but most "third world" eastern europe countries have some of the best internet infrastructures in the world with peanut prices.

Europe is made of many independent countries with different regulations and different operators.

In France it's €30 for triple-play, €20 for Internet only, but less than 50% have access to optical fiber. For more than half it's still ADSL. It works great if you live close to the telephone exchange, otherwise it can be very slow.

Grouping is a habit common by Americans, that I am still not able to grasp. They say Africans, Arabs, Asians, poor countries, third-world countries, Europe, Asians, etc. I specially hate it when they say I went Africa and now "The Muslims" all thrown together in politics, ugh.

You are modded down but internet in India is faster AND cheaper than USA.

But much less reliable, in my experience.

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