Mighty made a big splash recently with their HN launch.

Most commentators seem to be focusing on CPU / RAM savings as the pros and input latency / pricing as the cons. I find Mighty to be interesting for a different reason.

I think Mighty might work because of the effect of latency on networking round trips.

Most modern web based systems talk a lot and exchange messages based on the information they received from prior communications. Examples of this are:

  • TCP + TLS handshakes
  • websites loading stylesheets and scripts after the main document loads

 

latency-close-vs-far

The effects of latency increase as you move users and servers further apart.

 

Latency in and of itself is not a bad thing. Latency + round trips is what’s slowing everything down.

Streaming technology is free from these problems. There’s no round trips — streaming server just sends a video stream to the user. If you put Mighty streaming servers close to popular web services you massively decrease the amount of latency introduced by the round trips.

 

latency-close-vs-far

In this example the resulting latency is 90ms vs 360ms for the "standard" setup.
And that's only with 3 round trips

I could see a future in which Mighty becomes a client for a network of Mighty-enabled websites where instead of an HTTPS load balancer you put a video-streaming (Mighty?) server in front of your backend.