9 ms·

In this case you're probably right but in general, latency can make a big impact on profit and revenue. For example Marissa Mayer claimed (though this was in 2

by Veratyr 10y ago

In this case you're probably right but in general, latency can make a big impact on profit and revenue. For example Marissa Mayer claimed (though this was in 2006) that a 500ms delay directly caused a 20% drop in traffic and revenue: https://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html https://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20... Optimizely found that for The Telegraph, adding a 4s delay led to a 10% drop in pageviews: https://blog.optimizely.com/2016/07/13/how-does-page-load-time-impact-engagement/ https://blog.optimizely.com/2016/07/13/how-does-page-load-ti... 100ms cost Amazon 1% of sales: http://blog.gigaspaces.com/amazon-found-every-100ms-of-latency-cost-them-1-in-sales/ http://blog.gigaspaces.com/amazon-found-every-100ms-of-laten... Akamai has a number of claims: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/news/press/2009-press/akamai-reveals-2-seconds-as-the-new-threshold-of-acceptability-for-ecommerce-web-page-response-times.jsp https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/news/press/2009-press/aka... Of course the impact of latency is going to depend on your particular circumstances but there are certainly circumstances where it can make a big impact.

ci5er 10y ago
I wonder if Amazon has done other/more research since and softened their stance since that gigaspaces article... ... because I'm noticing, esp. over the last 1+ years, that Amazon's page loads are getting slower and slower (Win7, FF) with all of the "crud" they are loading with each/every page. I remember when it was all a lot snappier (not like an HN page load "snappy", but pretty good!)
- rajacombinator 10y ago
  Yep they sure put a lot of crap on their clunky pages. They could do much better but they don't seem to care.
- itsbits 10y ago
  my observation is Amazon hardly cares about web page performance..
- _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
  The 'fast' is not increasing revenue by itself I think. Faster pages => more products seen by user => higher likelihood they buy something. Amazon has shifted since then to pushing more products into your face, which looks like for them works better than the 'faster pages' approach.
chrismorgan 10y ago
Google: 2006. Amazon: 2006. Akamai: 2009. At least the Optimizely result is from this year. I really want more evidence of the importance of performance in web systems (to justify my hobby, if for no other reason), but things from ten years ago just don’t cut it. Can we please stop citing articles from ten years ago and cite some studies that aren’t more than two years old? Do people have more such studies? (Also I’d be interested in more geographically diverse results. Figures like “three seconds to abandonment” are absurd when you’re in Australia or India as I am. Most e-commerce sites—especially US/international ones—haven’t even started drawing at that point, even with the best Internet connectivity and computer performance available, simply because of latency if the site is hosted in the US only. I visited the US a couple of years ago and was amazed at just how fast the Internet was, simply due to reduced latency.)
- samastur 10y ago
  Why would you expect that visitors became more accepting of slower websites? If anything I would imagine to be the opposite with connections generally being faster these days. Especially since old Google's result was about observed effects of 100ms slowdown so not about generally slow websites.
  - chrismorgan 10y ago
    I’m not trying to say it will go one way or another—just that the variables in the equation have all changed (expectations, the nature of access to the Internet, ubiquity, &c.), so results from several years ago are obsolete (I’d even call results from over a year ago obsolescent) and we need new figures for credibility. People don’t necessarily become more demanding; maybe in the earlier days they said, “I don’t need this, it’s taking too long, I’ll just give up,” whereas now they are resigned to the Internet being slow. Also of interest would be making a site massively faster (e.g. by an apposite service worker implementation), but A/B test on the rollout of it. Over several months, ideally.
- Veratyr 10y ago
  > I really want more evidence of the importance of performance in web systems (to justify my hobby, if for no other reason), but things from ten years ago just don’t cut it. > Can we please stop citing articles from ten years ago and cite some studies that aren’t more than two years old? Could you explain why? New data is good, sure but why should we disregard old data? I think instead of asking for people to simply discard old data, you should point out the issues you believe the data has so that they can be addressed (with newer data if necessary). Anyhow, from https://riteproject.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/fact-sheet.pdf https://riteproject.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/fact-sheet.p...: - "In 2008 the Aberdeen Group found that a 1-second delay in page load time costs 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and a 7% decrease in searches that result in new customers." - In 2009 Microsoft Bing found that introducing 500ms extra delay translated to 1.2% less advertising revenue. I also found a whitepaper from 2010 done by Gomez.com that shows how speed impacts various metrics: https://github.com/JasonPaulGardner/po4ux/blob/master/InfoPack/wp_why_web_performance_matters.pdf https://github.com/JasonPaulGardner/po4ux/blob/master/InfoPa... There's also an article from 2013 that's only loosely related but shows that reducing TTFB latency can increase search result rankings: https://moz.com/blog/how-website-speed-actually-impacts-search-ranking https://moz.com/blog/how-website-speed-actually-impacts-sear... > Also I’d be interested in more geographically diverse results. I'd love these too, let me know if you find them.
jayajay 10y ago
This is reasonable. Aside for must-reads, I don't read articles or news stories, funny posts, memes, gifs, etc. if they take way too long to load (3000ms+), or if it's TLDR (unless it's must-read). Most of the time, stuff ends up being TLDR, and it's a quick skim to make sure I'm not missing must-read. On websites like Washington Post, Bloomberg, etc. there's just too much shit going on. Too many ads. Too many popups. Too many "please give me your email!" requests. Shit's everywhere on the internet. I'm not about to go to Rocket Fizz for a Snickers Bar.
NicoJuicy 10y ago
You can fix that when the product is released. It's called optimization, you don't need to do it upfront. Check if people like your software and you receive enough €€€, if it's market git. Optimize and make a blog post about it
- Shorel 10y ago
  But sometimes that fix can only be done by switching to another tech stack or framework. That is, a complete rewrite. When that's not possible, we have to endure the constantly crashing and slow as molasses web sites like the ones used in universities by students to enroll in courses.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Ya I have worked with the optimize at the end guys before. Really, you are gonna refactor a 100k Java codebase to be fast when its done? Want to know how much easier it is to plan for speed from day 1?
  - IanCal 10y ago
    As always, going too far either way is a bad idea. I've worked with "optimise everything ahead of time" people before and it can be an astonishing waste of time. You shouldn't completely ignore performance all the way through and assume you can sprinkle it on top later, but you shouldn't spend months squeezing the last few ms out of a feature that the client will change / remove when they try it anyway. > Really, you are gonna refactor a 100k Java codebase to be fast when its done? Maybe? Depends where the problems are. If the problems are huge architectural ones, no that sounds terrible. If the problem can be solved by later improving an inner loop somewhere and getting things solved then sure.
    - mozumder 10y ago
      Speed is user-experience. People used Instagram at first because it was fast. And they were quickly bought out for a billion.
amelius 10y ago
> 100ms cost Amazon 1% of sales I wonder why we don't have free high-speed internet yet, financed by big companies.
- adrianN 10y ago
  Google tries with fiber and balloons, but it's a very hard market to enter. Telcos are terribly regulated and investment costs are high.

by Veratyr 10y ago

ci5er 10y ago

I wonder if Amazon has done other/more research since and softened their stance since that gigaspaces article... ... because I'm noticing, esp. over the last 1+ years, that Amazon's page loads are getting slower and slower (Win7, FF) with all of the "crud" they are loading with each/every page. I remember when it was all a lot snappier (not like an HN page load "snappy", but pretty good!)

rajacombinator 10y ago
Yep they sure put a lot of crap on their clunky pages. They could do much better but they don't seem to care.
itsbits 10y ago
my observation is Amazon hardly cares about web page performance..
_Codemonkeyism 10y ago
The 'fast' is not increasing revenue by itself I think. Faster pages => more products seen by user => higher likelihood they buy something. Amazon has shifted since then to pushing more products into your face, which looks like for them works better than the 'faster pages' approach.

chrismorgan 10y ago

Google: 2006. Amazon: 2006. Akamai: 2009. At least the Optimizely result is from this year. I really want more evidence of the importance of performance in web systems (to justify my hobby, if for no other reason), but things from ten years ago just don’t cut it. Can we please stop citing articles from ten years ago and cite some studies that aren’t more than two years old? Do people have more such studies? (Also I’d be interested in more geographically diverse results. Figures like “three seconds to abandonment” are absurd when you’re in Australia or India as I am. Most e-commerce sites—especially US/international ones—haven’t even started drawing at that point, even with the best Internet connectivity and computer performance available, simply because of latency if the site is hosted in the US only. I visited the US a couple of years ago and was amazed at just how fast the Internet was, simply due to reduced latency.)

samastur 10y ago
Why would you expect that visitors became more accepting of slower websites? If anything I would imagine to be the opposite with connections generally being faster these days. Especially since old Google's result was about observed effects of 100ms slowdown so not about generally slow websites.
- chrismorgan 10y ago
  I’m not trying to say it will go one way or another—just that the variables in the equation have all changed (expectations, the nature of access to the Internet, ubiquity, &c.), so results from several years ago are obsolete (I’d even call results from over a year ago obsolescent) and we need new figures for credibility. People don’t necessarily become more demanding; maybe in the earlier days they said, “I don’t need this, it’s taking too long, I’ll just give up,” whereas now they are resigned to the Internet being slow. Also of interest would be making a site massively faster (e.g. by an apposite service worker implementation), but A/B test on the rollout of it. Over several months, ideally.
Veratyr 10y ago
> I really want more evidence of the importance of performance in web systems (to justify my hobby, if for no other reason), but things from ten years ago just don’t cut it. > Can we please stop citing articles from ten years ago and cite some studies that aren’t more than two years old? Could you explain why? New data is good, sure but why should we disregard old data? I think instead of asking for people to simply discard old data, you should point out the issues you believe the data has so that they can be addressed (with newer data if necessary). Anyhow, from https://riteproject.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/fact-sheet.pdf https://riteproject.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/fact-sheet.p...: - "In 2008 the Aberdeen Group found that a 1-second delay in page load time costs 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and a 7% decrease in searches that result in new customers." - In 2009 Microsoft Bing found that introducing 500ms extra delay translated to 1.2% less advertising revenue. I also found a whitepaper from 2010 done by Gomez.com that shows how speed impacts various metrics: https://github.com/JasonPaulGardner/po4ux/blob/master/InfoPack/wp_why_web_performance_matters.pdf https://github.com/JasonPaulGardner/po4ux/blob/master/InfoPa... There's also an article from 2013 that's only loosely related but shows that reducing TTFB latency can increase search result rankings: https://moz.com/blog/how-website-speed-actually-impacts-search-ranking https://moz.com/blog/how-website-speed-actually-impacts-sear... > Also I’d be interested in more geographically diverse results. I'd love these too, let me know if you find them.

jayajay 10y ago

This is reasonable. Aside for must-reads, I don't read articles or news stories, funny posts, memes, gifs, etc. if they take way too long to load (3000ms+), or if it's TLDR (unless it's must-read). Most of the time, stuff ends up being TLDR, and it's a quick skim to make sure I'm not missing must-read. On websites like Washington Post, Bloomberg, etc. there's just too much shit going on. Too many ads. Too many popups. Too many "please give me your email!" requests. Shit's everywhere on the internet. I'm not about to go to Rocket Fizz for a Snickers Bar.

NicoJuicy 10y ago

You can fix that when the product is released. It's called optimization, you don't need to do it upfront. Check if people like your software and you receive enough €€€, if it's market git. Optimize and make a blog post about it

Shorel 10y ago
But sometimes that fix can only be done by switching to another tech stack or framework. That is, a complete rewrite. When that's not possible, we have to endure the constantly crashing and slow as molasses web sites like the ones used in universities by students to enroll in courses.
brianwawok 10y ago
Ya I have worked with the optimize at the end guys before. Really, you are gonna refactor a 100k Java codebase to be fast when its done? Want to know how much easier it is to plan for speed from day 1?
- IanCal 10y ago
  As always, going too far either way is a bad idea. I've worked with "optimise everything ahead of time" people before and it can be an astonishing waste of time. You shouldn't completely ignore performance all the way through and assume you can sprinkle it on top later, but you shouldn't spend months squeezing the last few ms out of a feature that the client will change / remove when they try it anyway. > Really, you are gonna refactor a 100k Java codebase to be fast when its done? Maybe? Depends where the problems are. If the problems are huge architectural ones, no that sounds terrible. If the problem can be solved by later improving an inner loop somewhere and getting things solved then sure.
  - mozumder 10y ago
    Speed is user-experience. People used Instagram at first because it was fast. And they were quickly bought out for a billion.

amelius 10y ago

> 100ms cost Amazon 1% of sales I wonder why we don't have free high-speed internet yet, financed by big companies.

adrianN 10y ago
Google tries with fiber and balloons, but it's a very hard market to enter. Telcos are terribly regulated and investment costs are high.