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Comment by codegladiator | Hacker News Reader

Are you comparing search with a static page load ?

Just compare the google page load if you want to compare with that ?

I'm just asking you to do the test, because it was forced on me for 6 months of my life :)

Firstly, cr.yp.to is hosted on some really basic consumer grade hardware most likely and has to make an additional hop through Tonga of all places for DNS resolution.

Of course, the page size of cr.yp.to is very small and does not involve any other communication with other servers to deliver a request.

But Google has x million machines, x million miles of fiber, x million sticks of ram, and the page size on google also isn't terribly huge. And it's serving a cached result usually, the robot has already scraped it.

But still, because of the number of network pings that serving a single google search takes, it is extremely common on cell phones to lose service for a millisecond and completely destroy the bidirectional connection between you and Google, and your mobile browser will just sit there hanging forever until you force restart it.

> But Google has x million machines

That's because google has that amount of traffic. I am sure a hn hug would take the cypto site down.

Does using the .to TLD really imply that the request has to make a hop through Tonga? I'm not a DNS expert, but that doesn't sound right.

(I ask as the owner of a .so site...)

Short answer, No... Long answer, 'sort of'.

DJB uses a custom nameserver for DNS, so only one of the lookups would have to go through Tonga. The web request wouldn't leave the US (assuming that's where you are).

It goes sort of like this:

1. You query 'cr.yp.to' which your DNS server will either have cached, or make a recursive query to '.' (root DNS), then to '.to.' The '.to.' server will have nameserver information for 'yp.to.' which gets queried next.

2. The nameserver for 'yp.to' is looked up. In this case, it's `uz5jmyqz3gz2bhnuzg0rr0cml9u8pntyhn2jhtqn04yt3sm5h235c1.yp.to.'

3. The A records for that NS record are '131.193.32.109' and '131.193.32.108', both of which belong to an IPv4 block owned by the University of Illinois at Chicago.

4. Your computer queries the A record(s) for the subdomain, 'cr.yp.to.' from the nameserver for 'yp.to.' which in this case points to the same two IPs as the nameserver.

5. Depending on your OS/Browser, you will make an HTTP or HTTPS connection with that server and begin to download site content.

So, no you don't "make a hop" through Tonga, but the '.to.' nameserver will receive a request (if it's not cached by your resolver) to resolve the 'yp.to.' server.

I also am not an expert, but Dan J Bernstein (the owner of cr.yp.to) states that his website --- er actually hold on, I think I misremembered the story from his site. Let me paste it here:

2000-11-16: The .to administrators destroy yp.to for reasons that have never been explained.

See more here: https://cr.yp.to/serverinfo.html

That's quite an interesting page.

They had a recent outage after 3 years

> 2017.07.24 roughly 21:50 to 22:10: Unexplained network outage at UIC.

> 2020.04.20 roughly noon GMT: Power outage at UIC.

Hehe, UIC is the bane of cr.yp.to's existence, between network and power instability... Makes you appreciate what the big cloud players abstract away from us!

A cold cache google page load here pushes 725kb just to render a logo and search box. To avoid fingerprinting my cache is always cold.

Google search is a huge dog

Considering the functionality, what would be your limit to keep google from being considered a "huge dog"?

42 links, a text box, vector logo, 20kb and that's generous

Autocomplete function, dropdown menu JS, 10kb max

Considering this page is viewed by millions, and doesn't even contain the logic to render search results

I was linked https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite, and even without autocomplete or dropdown functionality, it comes in at 8.5 kB, so I'd say that the 10 kB goal is pretty aggressive.

Reverting to their own search site from 10 years ago?

You might be pleased to notice Google Scholar is pretty much still the old design, such a breeze to use

Well compare it to:

https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite

That seems unfair, considering there is no lite google equivalent. The full duckduckgo site still comes in lighter (3/4 of the size), and includes a lot more media, so it's still better than Google.

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