Web Response Time

Response Times.

Unfortunately, most of us use some sort of the web on a daily basis, you being here right now, implies that the statement is true, well at least for you.

The biggest frustration on the web, is the time at which pages take to load. The current project I am on at the moment, had issues of that sort, where the pages were take 10 Seconds+ to load, on a good day. Granted this was on Dev, it was not acceptable, and unfortunately I was very busy and could only focus minimal hours a day on it.



One morning not so long ago, I was called into a meeting, where the executives for the consulting house I work for were in discussion with a few of my colleagues about the speed of the applications we were writing and using. Where we would sit and wait for a while before a page would complete loading. We could nearly have a full discussion on the topic before the page would load.

This was a growing concern with them, and a plan was put into place where the team were supposed to go back and find out some things about the speeds of their respective applications. We had a teasing team put a plan in place to see exactly what was happening, page loads, find some base lines. I was not part of the team, but I did some testing of myself.

I came up with a few baselines, mostly when the network was not under stress. The scary part about all this was that the pages would be taking 10+ Seconds to load. With the fastest being the login page where there was two pictures, relatively small, and the login form. With this page taking about 6 seconds to load, pictures and all.

After about a week of this hype within the team, where there was only a real hype from the team that was actively looking into the problem. There was barely any movement from there, and about a week later this so called problem with fully blown plan just died, no more mention about the beast. Although the whole team knew about this issue, there was little done from a testing perspective there on out.


Unfortunately, we are in a world where we are used to everything fast, from our cars that we drive to the cell phones we have in our hands, even the coffee machine is making us a cup of coffee within a few seconds. We are based in a world where speed is everything. Every seconds counts.

Some scary facts are that, if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, a user has a 45% to abandon the page. About 50% of us, expect a page to take under 2 seconds to load. Now thing about that for a second or three. How likely are you to leave a page if it takes a few seconds to load?
Can you just imagine what would happen if Google took longer than 2 seconds to load. Wow, the world would crash.

Now a average user is not willing to wait 10 seconds for a page to load. What would make this any different.


With that at the back of your mind, don't you think performance is something to always keep at the back of your mind while doing something for a customer?  Every Developer should remember these points. 1 Second may just one day be a million dollar mistake.  Think about it one second may cost you a fortune.

#bearMan saving you Time.

Hardware cant solve every issue.