What I mean is that Amazon seems to think it doesn't matter that much if they're taking hundreds of ms (or over 1 s) to show me a basic page. The TCP+TLS handsh

What I mean is that Amazon seems to think it doesn't matter that much if they're taking hundreds of ms (or over 1 s) to show me a basic page. The TCP+TLS handshake takes like 60 ms, plus another RTT for the request is 80 ms total. If it takes 10 ms to generate the page (in fact it seems to take over 100), that should still be under 100 ms total on a fresh connection. But instead they send me off to fetch scripts from multiple other subdomains (more TCP+TLS handshakes). That alone completely ruins that 50 ms savings. So the observation is that apparently Amazon does not think 50 ms is very important. If they did, their page could be loading about 5-10x faster. Likewise with e.g. reddit; I don't know if that site has ever managed to load a page in under 1 s. New reddit is even worse. At one point new reddit was so slow that I could tap the URL bar on my phone, scroll to the left, and change www to old in less time than it took for the page to load. In that context, I find people talking about globally distributed systems/"data at the edge" to save 50 ms to be rather comical.