Automatically detecting client speed

We used to spend a lot of cycles worrying about detecting user agents (i.e. browser) and redirecting clients to the pages written specifically for that browser. You know, back when browser incompatibility was a way of life. Yesterday.

Compatibility is still an issue, but most web developers are either using third-party JavaScript libraries to handle detection and incompatibility issues or don't use those particular features that cause problems.

One thing still seen at times, however, is the "choose high bandwidth or low bandwidth" entry pages, particularly on sites laden with streaming video and audio, whose playback is highly sensitive to the effects of jitter and thus need a fatter pipe over which to stream.

Web site designers necessarily include the "choose your speed" page because they can't reliably determine client speed. Invariably, some user on a poor connection is going to choose high bandwidth anyway, and then e-mail or call to complain about poor service. Because that's how people are.

So obviously we still have a need to detect client speed, but the code and method of doing so in the web application would be prohibitively complex and consume time and resources better spent elsewhere. But we'd still like to direct the client to the appropriate page without asking, because we're nice that way - or more likely we just want to avoid the phone call later. That would be a huge motivator for me, but I'm like that. I hate phones. 

Whatever the reason, detecting client speed is valuable for directing users to appropriate content as well as providing other functionality, such as compression. Compression is itself a resource consuming function and applying compression in some situations can actually degrade performance, effectively negating the improvement in response time gained by decreasing the size of the data to be transferred.

If you've got an intelligent application delivery platform in place, you can automatically determine client speed and direct requests based on that speed without needing to ask the client for input. Using iRules, just grab the round-trip time (or bandwidth) and rewrite the URI accordingly:

    when HTTP_REQUEST { 
        if { [TCP::rtt] >= 1000 } { 
            HTTP::uri "/slowsite.html" 
        } 
    } 

If you don't want to automatically direct the client, you could use this information to add a message to your normal "choose your bandwidth" page that lets the client know their connection isn't so great and perhaps they should  choose the lower-bandwidth option. This is also good for collecting statistics, if you're interested, on the types of connections your customers and users are on. This can help you make a decision regarding whether you even need that choice page, and maybe lead to only supporting one option - making the development and maintenance of your site and video/audio all that much more streamlined.