Offer HN: I'll test your web app from Tanzania | Hacker News Reader

Offer HN: I'll test your web app from Tanzania

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162 pointsthebenedict53 comments

If you work on anything web related and you have a Mac or an iOS device, I strongly encourage you to try the "Network Link Conditioner". It's a preference pane (on OS X) or a setting (on iOS) that allows you to simulate different types of networks. You can artificially limit bandwidth and transmission delay, simulate package loss and DNS delay.

For me, it's become an essential tool for testing website & app performance.

Nice! Does anyone know whether something like this exists on Windows?

Google Chrome Canary has network throttling functionality.

As does plain Google Chrome, at least on OSX. Open Dev Tools and click the 2nd icon on top, next to the loupe, which looks like a mobile phone. From there you can specify a set of throttling speeds (offline, gprs, edge, 3G, DSL, Wifi)

Fiddler or Network Emulator for Windows Toolkit perhaps. I'm sure there are other options though.

There is crapify [1]. I remember seeing other tools as well, but can't find them at the moment.

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/crapify

I like "clumsy", which has a perfect animated GIF showing the app:

http://jagt.github.io/clumsy/index.html

This is great. Thanks.

Since nearly every Windows web dev has Fiddler2, it can simulate network latency: http://helephant.com/2012/07/11/simulating-network-latency-w...

I believe Fiddler handles this? Not very friendly to change, but it's documented here http://docs.telerik.com/fiddler/KnowledgeBase/FiddlerScript/...

Chrome has a network throttling emulation in the dev tools too: https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/device-mode

One thing I wish I was able to do in the Chrome tools is to set my bandwith and latency preferences manually...

Yes! There is a huge jump between DSL and Wi-Fi. Adding the ability to randomly drop out the network would be nice too.

Somebody opened an issue on the Chromium bug tracker asking for the ability to customize those parameters. The Chromium devs added another preset and marked it as "fixed" even though it clearly isn't.

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=441858

It doesn't affect things like Web Sockets though.

There's also Comcast[0]. No clue if it's any good but the name is amazing.

[0] https://github.com/tylertreat/Comcast

Seems like a copy of the joke the people of The Onion came up with a few months earlier, ComcastifyJS: https://theonion.github.io/comcastifyjs/

If you're on a Linux system, the 'tc' (traffic control) command has many similar abilities, though the UI is CLI only and is a bit cryptic. There are many posts and articles on usage though, including the Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic Control manual.

You don't have to go to Africa for network latency testing. Here's McDonald's Sunnyvale today:

64 bytes from 72.9.103.50: icmp_seq=32201 ttl=47 time=3894.012 ms 64 bytes from 72.9.103.50: icmp_seq=32202 ttl=47 time=4160.846 ms 64 bytes from 72.9.103.50: icmp_seq=32203 ttl=47 time=4438.250 ms 64 bytes from 72.9.103.50: icmp_seq=32205 ttl=47 time=4511.332 ms 64 bytes from 72.9.103.50: icmp_seq=32206 ttl=47 time=4877.157 ms 64 bytes from 72.9.103.50: icmp_seq=32207 ttl=47 time=4230.125 ms 64 bytes from 72.9.103.50: icmp_seq=32208 ttl=47 time=4140.820 ms 64 bytes from 72.9.103.50: icmp_seq=32209 ttl=47 time=3657.129 ms 64 bytes from 72.9.103.50: icmp_seq=32210 ttl=47 time=3668.067 ms 64 bytes from 72.9.103.50: icmp_seq=32211 ttl=47 time=3978.231 ms 64 bytes from 72.9.103.50: icmp_seq=32212 ttl=47 time=3639.352 ms 64 bytes from 72.9.103.50: icmp_seq=32213 ttl=47 time=3559.121 ms 64 bytes from 72.9.103.50: icmp_seq=32214 ttl=47 time=3362.324 ms

For every other location BUT Africa you can get a speed test from this site: http://www.webpagetest.org/ -- this also lets you different browsers and run an initial + repeated (with something cached) test.

Very cool! I work with the Anglican Diocese of Central Tanganyika. We host out of the U.S., and they are always complaining of page load time issues.

Do you know of/recommend any local hosts?

Hi! I've heard good things about Habari Node[1], and Angania[2] is a startup working on Nairobi-based hosting. That said, I and most developers I know in the region host internationally. As others have mentioned latency is usually a bigger problem than bandwidth. Happy to take a look at your site if helpful (just add it to the form).

[1] (http://www.habari.co.tz/) [2] (https://angani.co/)

Depends on where your clients are in Africa -- if in the South then for example http://www.rsaweb.co.za/ could be a good choice. Have had some VMs with them, no issues.

Also Hetzner has servers in South Africa: http://www.hetzner.co.za/webhosting/buyersguide/hosting-loca...

From personal experience whilst traveling through Tanzania & Kenya using a 4G modem from Safaricom the issue was/is latency. Bandwidth is plentiful but the latency is horrible which resulted in AJAX applications timing out before requests could be completed. Example of this was Gmail, the application would not even function in AJAX mode but switching to plain HTML mode, whilst it took forever, worked like a charm every time.

You may want to update what facebook has stored for your form's OG data as it has some old info/screenshots.

What I see: http://imgur.com/2OPznGX

Update here: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

AaaS - Africa as a service

It's a cool idea, but it is really just TaaS (Tanzania as a Service), or maybe South-east Africa as a service (decent submarine cable connections). From what I've heard bandwidth remains prohibitively expensive in places like Namibia and Botswana, while it is increasingly cheap in South Africa, where I was able to smoothly stream ''House of Cards'' from Netflix (via proxy) using an uncapped connection.

TlDR: Africa is not a country

you mind doing some traceroutes to 4.2.2.2 and 8.8.8.8 just out of curiosity? :)

8.8.8.8 is public DNS from Google.

4.2.2.2 is private DNS from Level3; see eg http://www.tummy.com/articles/famous-dns-server/ for a history.

Sure. I'm on Smile Tanzania atm, a 4G carrier (though slower than 4G in the US or Europe). This isn't the carrier I'll use for web app tests.

http://dpaste.com/129AKD2 http://dpaste.com/37YE2VY

Looks like your provider is traversing through TATA Communications (AS6453) on both of those.

Wonder what your latency would be with a SEACOM(AS37100) traversal, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_Tanzania

Here are your downstream carrier options : http://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS37100&v=4&...

Neat. My rough understanding is that carriers here route traffic through SEACOM, EASSy (and likely others) to minimize cost and traffic. I don't think I can choose SEACOM specifically -- but I'm always up to test Cunningham's Law.

Your traffic traversed through SMILE>Zantel>Tata .. You may not be able to influence the best path to reach Google through Smile even though Zantel might be multihomed (unless the best path changes). I'd recommend testing from other providers such as SPICE-NET-TZ, TZ or simbanet-tz,TZ etc. [ Look above at the Seacom's downstream adjacent AS link I provided to find if you can use any of those carrier instead ]

  # whois -h whois.cymru.com 41.138.222.196
  AS      | IP               | AS Name
  327692  | 41.138.222.196   | SMILECOMMS,UG
  # whois -h whois.cymru.com 41.73.194.97
  AS      | IP               | AS Name
  36930   | 41.73.194.97     | Zantel-AS,TZ

HI MIKE!

I think you're the only other person I know who reads HN.

Neat idea.

Tanzanian here writing this from dar es salaam,Tanzania.

I have never hear of this "smile" company so i looked them up and their prices[1] seem ridiculous.

I use vodacom and i pay 20,000 shillings a month for unlimited internet.This company charges 17,500 a month for 1GB.

vodacom,like other companies also have more options[2].

Why do you use this company?

ps: 1USD is equivalent to about 1500 shillings so 20000 shillings is about 13USD

[1] http://smile.co.tz/products-services/

[2] https://www.vodacom.co.tz/internetservices/prepaid_packages/...

Looks like smile has 4G LTE, so is probably significantly faster.

How fast is it? To my NZ ears these prices sound fantastic, as we usually pay about 5-6 times that for unlimited internet (if unlimited is even an option; it only is in certain urban areas). But presumably it's quite slow?

i just updated by linux box using apt-get and it reported: "Fetched 47.0MB in 2m3s (381kB/s)".

Thats 3Mbps. This kind of speeds happen from time to time but long downloads or streams are usually capped at around 300kbps( around 40kBps).

The speed is decent enough during normal web surfing.

You should come to the Debian conference in Cape Town next year :)

https://jonathancarter.org/2015/02/13/debconf-2016-to-be-hos...

Hi! I use Smile because it's a little faster and significantly more reliable than the others. Most of my business and personal communication abroad happens via video Skype. Voda and Airtel are sometimes fast enough, but often aren't especially during peak times. I hate having to tell clients that my connection isn't good enough for a scheduled call.

For an idea of what I'm talking about, here's 70 second pings to google.com from an especially frustrating morning in January on Vodacom TZ: http://i.imgur.com/5urJcd7.png. This isn't typical but happens often enough to be a problem.

With Smile I'm paying rates comparable to 4G service in the US, e.g. TMobile[1]. The service isn't nearly as fast (peak I've seen is ~3.5 Megabytes/sec download) but the reliability makes it worth it. I suspect I'm paying as much for lower contention ratios on the towers as for "4G" infrastructure, but the end result is the same.

[1] (http://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans/mobile-internet.htm...)

here's 70 second pings to google.com

Wow. I wonder where on the link a packet can get stuck for so long without being dropped.

RFC 1149 comes to mind... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers)

I always thought that 8.8.8.8 was routed by anycast, thus pointing to the closest server.

I think you meant 8.8.4.4

There's also the excellent Charles Proxy that serves as a mitm proxy and lets you throttle the connection among other things.

So how is it living there? Curios... I live in NYC, my brother is flying out to test out his micro solar chargers...Any insights?

The tech community is smallish but it's an easy place to live. Feel free to ping me with specific q's, or if your brother wants to grab a coffee if he passes through Dar. My email is my HN handle at gmail.

Nice service, thanks for offering it.

Je, mtu yeyote hapa kusema swahili?.......

Hapana, tu programmers mzungu hapa ;)

Mkundu wewe!

Ndio, tuko wengi hapa kaka! :)

kiswahili lugha yangu ya kwanza kama mtanzania niliyezaliwa na kukulia dar es salaam,tanzania.

kuna watanzania wengi tu hapa HN na walijitokeza kwenye thread moja miezi michache iliyopita. Siwezi kupost link ya hiyo thread sababu siikumbuki link yenyewe na nahisi uvivu kuitafuta.

A few folks showed up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7837397

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