[acdha]

My guess is that “Europe” is being used as a proxy for “high latency, low bandwidth” – especially if the person in question uses a VPN (especially one of those terrible “SSL VPN” kludges). It’s still surprisingly common to encounter software with poor latency handling or servers with broken window scaling because most of the people who work on them are relatively close and have high bandwidth connection.

[jerf]

And given the way of internal corporate networks, probably also "high failure rate", not because of "the internet", but the pile of corporate infrastructure needed for auditability, logging, security access control, intrusion detection, maxed out internal links... it's amazing any of this ever functions.

[acdha]

Or simply how those multiply latency - I’ve seen enterprise IT dudes try to say 300ms LAN latency is good because nobody wants to troubleshoot their twisted mess of network appliances and it’s not technically down if you’re not getting an error…

(Bonus game: count the number of annual zero days they’re exposed to because each of those vendors still ships 90s-style C code)

[sroussey]

Or high packet loss.

Every once in a while, my router used to go crazy with seemingly packet loss (I think a memory issue).

Normal websites would become super slow for any pc or phone in the house.

But git… git would fail to clone anything not really small.

My fix was to unplug the modem and router and plug back in. :)

It took a long time to discover the router was reporting packet loss, and that the slowness the browsers were experiencing has to do with some retries, and that git just crapped out.

Eventually when git started misbehaving I restarted the router to fix.

And now I have a new router. :)

[hinkley]

Sounds, based on other responders, like high latency high bandwidth, which is a problem many of us have trouble wrapping our heads around. Maybe complicated by packet loss.

After COVID I had to set up a compressing proxy for Artifactory and file a bug with JFrog about it because some of my coworkers with packet loss were getting request timeouts that npm didn’t handle well at all. Npm of that era didn’t bother to check bytes received versus content-length and then would cache the wrong answer. One of my many, many complaints about what total garbage npm was prior to ~8 when the refactoring work first started paying dividends.