What Kind Of Performance Can You Expect
When using Light Point Web to view a webpage, none of that website’s code ever reaches your computer. Instead we have our own browser on one of our computers that will receive that website’s code, and render it into a webpage. We then send an interactive video image of that webpage to your computer.
When you use your mouse or keyboard on that video, we perform those same operations on our browser. As the website changes, your view is updated.
The question is: how fast does all of this happen? This article will discuss the common interactions a user has with a browser and how the performance compares when using Light Point Web.
Displaying a Webpage
If you type a URL, hit back/forward, reload, or click a link within a page a new website will be loaded. Light Point Web will show you a fully loaded site on average less than a second slower than without Light Point Web.
Scrolling a Webpage
If you scroll with your arrow keys, mouse wheel, keyboard buttons such as page up/down, or by clicking on the arrows in the scroll bars, the scroll time is extremely fast. In most cases you will not be able to see a difference. If you are scrolling over a large image, you might notice the newly visible part of the image appear a fraction of a second after it should.
Scrolling by clicking and dragging the scroll bar is noticeably slower for some websites. Parts of the webpage that are newly visible may not appear immediately. After you let go of the scroll bar, the page will be displayed properly within a second on average.
Performance of scrolling is dependent on the contents of the page. Most pages are extremely fast, but some contain elements that slow Light Point Web down. As time goes on, we will identify these elements and build optimizations to improve this performance.
Page Animations
Some websites have components that move around. It could be a picture that slides away to show another picture, or an auto-updating twitter feed, or maybe an animated gif image.
Most of these operations are very fast. Animated gifs perform as well as if it was animating on your computer. Sliding pictures may show some jumpiness that is an artifact of Light Point Web. Light Point Web has the most noticeable slow down when a picture slowly fades into another picture.
Creating a New Tab
You can right-click a link in Light Point Web and open that link in a new tab. This causes a new tab to be created in your browser, and a new browser process to be started on our server. The new browser will load the requested page so you can then see it. This process is not noticeably slower than doing the same thing without Light Point Web in most cases. In some rare cases it can take a few seconds longer.
Starting Light Point Web
When you first connect to Light Point Web, you must wait for a server to be allocated, network connections to be established among other tasks before you can begin browsing. This process takes around 5 – 10 seconds on average.
Bandwidth Usage
One would think that the kind of performance seen with Light Point Web must use a lot of network bandwidth. The network protocol used by Light Point Web is extremely efficient. A worst case browsing session consisting solely of opening and scrolling large images across many tabs shows a rate of less than 25KB per second.
A more average case browsing session consisting of opening pages with pictures and text, actually reading them, and scrolling as necessary yields a rate closer to 5KB per second.