building the network…

t = 0.0 msACT 01 · ENTER — you press it

FACT You press Enter

The browser reads https://example.com/ as a scheme (https, so port 443 and TLS), a host and a path. Before anything leaves the machine it checks its own DNS cache, then asks the operating system — the stub resolver behind getaddrinfo(), which looks in its cache and the hosts file. On a cold start all three are empty, so the question goes out on the network.

Between pressing Enter and seeing a page, a browser does four separate jobs in a fixed order: find the address (DNS), open a connection (TCP), secure it (TLS), and ask for the page (HTTP). Each costs at least one round trip across the network. Step through them; the clock top-left counts milliseconds on the timing preset you choose in act 07.

  • FACT example.com is reserved for documentation by RFC 2606 and run by IANA.
  • MODEL The clock assumes nothing was cached anywhere: a cold start.

See it from your own browser on /journey · the wider network on /internet

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sources
  • RFC 1034 / 1035 — Domain names: concepts and facilities; implementation and specification (Mockapetris, 1987).
  • RFC 9156 — DNS Query Name Minimisation to Improve Privacy (2021).
  • RFC 2308 — Negative caching of DNS queries; RFC 8767 — Serving stale data.
  • RFC 8484 — DNS over HTTPS; RFC 7858 — DNS over TLS.
  • root-servers.org — operators, addresses and sites of the 13 root server identities; 2,047 instances (read 11 Oct 2026).
  • RFC 2606 — Reserved top-level DNS names (example.com).
  • RFC 9293 — Transmission Control Protocol (2022); RFC 6528 — Defending against sequence number attacks; RFC 7323 — TCP extensions for high performance; RFC 6928 — Increasing TCP's initial window.
  • RFC 8446 — The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol Version 1.3 (2018); RFC 5246 — TLS 1.2.
  • RFC 7748 — Elliptic Curves for Security (X25519, X448); Bernstein, "Curve25519: new Diffie-Hellman speed records", PKC 2006.
  • NIST FIPS 203 — Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism Standard (ML-KEM), Aug 2024; IETF draft-ietf-tls-ecdhe-mlkem (X25519MLKEM768).
  • RFC 5280 — Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Certificate and CRL Profile.
  • RFC 6962 — Certificate Transparency.
  • CA/Browser Forum Ballot SC-081 — Introduce schedule of reducing validity and data reuse periods (2025).
  • Chromium blog, "An update on the lock icon" (2023) — the padlock replaced by a neutral icon from Chrome 117.
  • RFC 9110 — HTTP Semantics; RFC 9113 — HTTP/2; RFC 7541 — HPACK; RFC 9114 — HTTP/3; RFC 9000 / 9001 — QUIC and its use of TLS; RFC 7838 — HTTP Alternative Services.
  • Own measurements, 11 Oct 2026: iterative DNS queries (UDP, EDNS0, RD=0) to each root letter, l.gtld-servers.net and hera.ns.cloudflare.com, 7 queries each; curl 8.5.0 / OpenSSL 3.0.13 against https://example.com, 11 runs; certificate chain via openssl s_client -showcerts.
  • Speed of light in optical fibre ≈ c / 1.47 ≈ 204,000 km/s, i.e. about 1 ms of round trip per 100 km of distance.

Tags: FACT a standard or public record · MEASURED recorded 11 Oct 2026 from one home line · MODEL stated round numbers. The 3D models are built for this page; no images are used. Related: your own request's journey, the internet.