5 ms·

There are tons of examples where low latency is good for business, even small businesses. I'm sure you've seen the studies from Amazon that every 100ms of page

by jupp0r 3y ago

There are tons of examples where low latency is good for business, even small businesses. I'm sure you've seen the studies from Amazon that every 100ms of page load latency is costing them 1% of revenue, etc. Also everything communication is very latency sensitive. Of course there are plenty of scenarios where latency does not matter at all.

groestl 3y ago
So you can trade off 300ms of additional roundtrip time (on anything non-CDNable) at a cost of 3% revenue and reduce your infrastructure complexity a lot
throwaway22032 3y ago
Not every business is based on impulse buys. Amazon is a pretty biased sample there.
- jupp0r 3y ago
  Is this agreeing with "Of course there are plenty of scenarios where latency does not matter at all." or are you trying to make a point?
- threeseed 3y ago
  That latency is correlated with revenue is not exclusive to Amazon. And many people who aren’t impulse buying will not stick around on slow sites.
  - pdimitar 3y ago
    Disagreed, once we're not talking a worldwide shop for non-critical buys like Amazon the picture changes dramatically. Many people on local markets have no choice and will stick around no matter how slow the service is. Evidence: my wife buying our groceries for delivery at home. We have 4-5 choices in our city. All their websites are slow as hell, and I mean adding an item to a cart takes good 5-10 seconds. Search takes 20+ seconds. She curses at them every time yet there's nothing we can do. The alternative is both of us to travel by foot 20 minutes to the local mall and wait on queues. 2-3 times a week. She figured the slow websites are the lesser evil.
kortilla 3y ago
Your mind is stuck in low cost retail shopping. Even setting aside the likely self-serving nature of that “study”, most interactions are not latency sensitive like that. When I go to book my colonoscopy on my hospital’s reservation system, I don’t bail out and look for a new doctor if it takes me 10 tries. There are very few businesses where UX latency at the sub second level matters and the ones that do are not the ones you want to be in.
- jupp0r 3y ago
  I've spent a good chunk of my career in realtime audio/video conferencing and am now working on APIs for B2B SaaS, thanks ;) I also know that user experience of any application suffers a lot when latencies are high. Your point seems to be that there is lots of software that doesn't care about its user experience (mostly because the people making buying decisions are not the people suffering from those decisions) and that's a fair point, but I don't think that is a great business strategy for any software business. Of course there are lots of scenarios where latency literally doesn't matter at all.

by jupp0r 3y ago

groestl 3y ago

So you can trade off 300ms of additional roundtrip time (on anything non-CDNable) at a cost of 3% revenue and reduce your infrastructure complexity a lot

throwaway22032 3y ago

Not every business is based on impulse buys. Amazon is a pretty biased sample there.

jupp0r 3y ago
Is this agreeing with "Of course there are plenty of scenarios where latency does not matter at all." or are you trying to make a point?
threeseed 3y ago
That latency is correlated with revenue is not exclusive to Amazon. And many people who aren’t impulse buying will not stick around on slow sites.
- pdimitar 3y ago
  Disagreed, once we're not talking a worldwide shop for non-critical buys like Amazon the picture changes dramatically. Many people on local markets have no choice and will stick around no matter how slow the service is. Evidence: my wife buying our groceries for delivery at home. We have 4-5 choices in our city. All their websites are slow as hell, and I mean adding an item to a cart takes good 5-10 seconds. Search takes 20+ seconds. She curses at them every time yet there's nothing we can do. The alternative is both of us to travel by foot 20 minutes to the local mall and wait on queues. 2-3 times a week. She figured the slow websites are the lesser evil.

kortilla 3y ago

Your mind is stuck in low cost retail shopping. Even setting aside the likely self-serving nature of that “study”, most interactions are not latency sensitive like that. When I go to book my colonoscopy on my hospital’s reservation system, I don’t bail out and look for a new doctor if it takes me 10 tries. There are very few businesses where UX latency at the sub second level matters and the ones that do are not the ones you want to be in.

jupp0r 3y ago
I've spent a good chunk of my career in realtime audio/video conferencing and am now working on APIs for B2B SaaS, thanks ;) I also know that user experience of any application suffers a lot when latencies are high. Your point seems to be that there is lots of software that doesn't care about its user experience (mostly because the people making buying decisions are not the people suffering from those decisions) and that's a fair point, but I don't think that is a great business strategy for any software business. Of course there are lots of scenarios where latency literally doesn't matter at all.