8 ms·
200 Milliseconds
- felooboolooomba 2mo ago> The person who clicked noticed no delay. Just to be the "actually..." guy: People notice 200ms delay. It's just that in cases it doesn't cause any bad feelings."
- zahlman 2mo agoI learned three thresholds over the years. Well, one of them decades ago and the others recently. Basically: At 50ms, you notice. At 400ms, you care. At 2000ms, without output, you wonder if it crashed. (That was the old one.)
- p-e-w 2mo ago> At 2000ms, without output, you wonder if it crashed. (That was the old one.) That must have been a really, really long time ago indeed, because there are very few websites now that take less than 2000ms to load. The linked site didn’t even come close on my phone (probably 3-4 seconds), and I most certainly didn’t wonder whether it had crashed.
- bloppe 2mo agoGitHub
- hobonation 2mo ago[dead]
- Aurornis 2mo agoThe timing refers to feeling like the device acknowledged your request with some response. Not seeing the final completion of the request. Your phone probably showed something after you clicked the link but before the page rendered: Link highlight change, a progress bar, etc. If your phone had crashed and the browser was non-responsive, you would have recognized it quickly. More quickly than the page load time.
- zahlman 2mo agoYes, exactly what I meant. (FWIW, the original context was J2ME mobile games. It was important to use as few classes as possible to keep JAR size down; but in my testing, everything put into the entry-point class had to be loaded before the program would get past an initial black screen.)
- Crunchified 2mo agoI'm finding more and more web sites that won't load at all until I request them a second time.
- dylan604 2mo agomaybe the site's debouncing logic on the buttons isn't working well
- thenthenthen 2mo agoI dunno man, i am In China.. everything outside of it takes at least 2000-5000 ms to even start responding on a good day
- inigyou 2mo agoThat is your government trying to block you
- aa-jv 2mo agoIn the audio/synth world, the lower bound is 8ms, as in, anything above this can become bothersome to the musician. I've heard it stated that this is also the threshold for fighter pilot control systems providing feedback.
- taneq 2mo agoI was expecting the site it’s talking about to have faked an instant response. Ironically, sometimes it goes the other way and UIs have to fake a small delay otherwise the user won’t believe it’s actually done anything (although arguably the real issue there is lack of positive feedback, not response time.)
- jvuygbbkuurx 2mo agoIndeed. But there are also delays that cause good feelings. I still remember the POS in my previous employers cafeteria. It had something like 100-200ms delay in processing a contactless payment card. It felt like an order of magnitude faster than any grocery store (exact same POS device). It was always very satisfying to pay for lunch. By the time you brought the card to the reader it felt like it was already printing the receipt. I always wonder how it was so fast and if it was just some random dev optimising some obscure edge case.
- jonathanlydall 2mo agoIn South Africa I notice this difference all the time where the big supermarket chains seem to be near instantaneous while small stores are 10+ seconds. I'm certain it's because the big store's card machines have a wired network connection to a router with a fibre connection, while most smaller shops just use card machines with integrated GPRS wireless modems as they even show feedback about connecting as you tap your card. A stall vendor who I use somewhat regularly warned me one time that her card machine was down (I guess some kind of maintenance as it was earlyish on a Sunday morning) so would only be able to accept cash. I helped her put the card machine on a nearby shop's free WiFi and not only did it work around the problem, but it made card transactions going forward significantly faster.
- ksec 2mo agoMay be your cafeteria was doing offline processing, while other were doing it online? But even offline there are huge differences, say Visa / Mastercard EMV and Suicia's Felica in Japan, where the whole transaction finish in 150ms. There were previously some work where they try to get it down to 50ms, I don't know if they are still working on it or has abandoned it.
- advisedwang 2mo agoUsers know to expect different things at different speeds, and have come to expect the actual "buy" button to be slow. 200ms is pretty fast for that, tbf
- 3dedb728-3f77 2mo ago200ms is insane, 50ms is the goal. But really, great page. Someone new could learn from it the basics of what to check when debugging web.
- ahofmann 2mo agoThe US is so big, that 50 ms is physically not possible for everyone. This is something that not everybody is aware of. When I as a German build something for germans, everyone who needs to wait longer than 100 ms for a request, is rightfully mad. But when I want to serve the same stuff to americans at the same speed, I have to build something completely different and much more complex.
- ben_w 2mo ago> When I as a German build something for germans, everyone who needs to wait longer than 100 ms for a request, is rightfully mad. Somewhat ironic, given how many contracts here seem to come with 3 months notice periods.
- fragmede 2mo agoNot for everyone, but most people are located in population centers with nearby PoPs.
- rcxdude 2mo agoYeah, but you would need to run an API server in each of those to reach that latency, and even then you're well into eventually-consistent distributed system headache if you accept the POST without synchronising with all the others first.
- fragmede 2mo agoYou terminate SSL (err, TLS) at the pop so the clients TCP connection gets setup faster, and then you use a hot TCP connection from the pop to a centralized API server. That gets you not having to deal with the headache of running a distributed system but a better experience for the client.
- beders 2mo agoThis is magnificent! Gave me roller-coaster ride across 40 years of gathering knowledge about computers and networks. I'm very jealous of whoever created that. Well done!
- ahofmann 2mo agoWhile I also enjoyed it very much, some thing are strangely ordered and not how I would expect someone with such knowledge of all the moving parts in a request, would build such a site. So for me it feels like an LLM has build it and the human with the prompt saw it and said "eh, good enough".
- mimischi 2mo agoAgreed. This reeks LLM writing with no human oversight, or at least a human with no writing experience. The text underneath “The Click” is an immediate giveaway: > Five milliseconds of hardware and browser bookkeeping before a single byte leaves the laptop. I don’t even know how to describe it, but the “[…] before X” sentence style stands out to me.
- LeBit 2mo agoYou are not jealous. You are envious. Homer explains it best https://youtu.be/Tmx1jpqv3RA https://youtu.be/Tmx1jpqv3RA
- mittermayr 2mo agothanks for posting this, I just shared this with everyone in the room here and nobody knew the difference.
- beders 2mo agoI can always rely on hacker news to improve my English
- samlinnfer 2mo agoNot really, jealous is defined as envious (being envious is one of the definitions of being jealous). For common usage they are equivalent, e.g. I'm jealous of X is the same as I'm envious of X.
- viggio24 2mo agoWonderful page, congratulations! navigating to the end takes time but the contents and the presentation are great
- inerte 2mo agoBack in the day "what happens when the user types a url in the address bar and press enter" used to be an interview question, and I remember nobody has ever mentioned the hardware and keyboard keys and interrupts. This post does! Pretty awesome detailed view of a request lifecycle.
- Carrok 2mo agoI still like this question because of exactly what you mentioned. What the interviewee does and does not mention can give you a fair bit of insight into their priors.
- Sesse__ 2mo agoI once got that question, started with the keyboard switches and the interrupts, and the interviewer sighed and asked me to get to the stuff in the browser.
- jameshart 2mo agoI’ve always wanted a version of this sort of a timeline that really lets you zoom out and in to the fractal complexity of it all. Right at the end we’re talking about updating the DOM and rendering… there’s a whole Unicode and font stack and rasterization process happening in there.
- jonahrd 2mo agoAm I crazy if for something like an online purchase, I kind of expect it to take a second or two to process the payment, so I would assume something went wrong if it was 200ms?
- JoeBOFH 2mo agoSame, I call it the perception of work.
- dagi3d 2mo agoI remember prior de AI era, it was a common pattern to for some delay in the answers to make it feel more "human"
- blue_sauce_bean 2mo agoYour comment reminded me of when Google introduced "Instant Search" in 2010. Here's an old HN thread from the launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391
- eterm 2mo agoNo-one mourned when that one went to the Google Graveyard.
- dataflow 2mo agoThat was terrible, I used to always turn it off. It's like speaking one word and the person interrupting you based on the prefix you had uttered so far... every single darn word. Imagine writing "how do I kill" and having it assume you meant a living being rather than a program.
- antonymoose 2mo agoI’ve definitely had in the UX side a situation where the PM/Owner types asked me to introduce a delay in the “disabled button with loading spinner” such that the user sees it for a visible amount of time because our API was too fast for their taste.
- eterm 2mo agoThe CSS animation of the encrypted message overwriting the plain is utterly cool.
- arjie 2mo agoWow, input lag is a lot lower than I thought. I thought it was a polling-based flow at some 120 Hz roughly. Good to update these numbers.
- omgtehlion 2mo agoYou actually should not, usual (non-gaming) mice still do the same (most touchpads in cheap laptops even slower, they share already slow i2c bus with several other endpoints), and the article ignores drivers and the UI stack altogether.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Cabbache 2mo agoThis is very nice and for me especially because I've tried to think about it before your post. I think you can write a very long book if you go really into detail such as the underlying physics for wifi starting from maxwell's equations, how specific CPU architectures execute one instruction at a hardware level and maybe more in depth discussion about the math and cryptography within TLS.
- joshstrange 2mo ago> Violet marks the data as it moves, always top to bottom. Nothing else on the page uses that color. Proceeds to use that color for tooltips, text color, headers, and more This was a really cool visualization but that ^ bothered me way more than it should have.
- dangoodmanUT 2mo agoIf it was 200ms, then it had already charged the card...
- Retr0id 2mo ago> Violet marks the data as it moves, always top to bottom. Nothing else on the page uses that color. I'm seeing 3 violet elements on my screen. "ms" in the top left, the dot next to that text, and a dot on a horizontal timeline at the lower edge of the screen. Scrolling down I see yet more violet UI elements, I assume the one on the vertical timeline represents the data, while all the others represent... other things. It seems violet is just the accent colour used for everything, which makes it an especially perplexing comment. I can only assume the "author" never even read the LLM's output before posting it.
- anon7000 2mo agoYeah this smells like the type of comment an LLM leaves when it gets a really specific instruction. “use one consistent color for the data timeline. Right now we’re using multiple which is confusing.” Then the LLM writes some comment that’s a mini retrospective on what happened to justify itself.
- foolswisdom 2mo agoClaude seems to do this all the time. That, the empty words and the increased self initiative of claude were all reasons I decided to just use codex (now merged into GPT).
- pennomi 2mo agoClaude using documentation and comments as its personal diary is one of the most infuriating behaviors it exhibits. Half the time it’ll record some temporary implementation quirk, which later sessions interpret as infallible product design requirements. Absolutely unsustainable.
- stratts 2mo agoCodex does this too, I've noticed. LLMs seem to love documenting irrelevant implementation details in what should be user-facing text. I guess because the context is overwhelmingly the technical side of things, so without a later directive to steer it, that's what's most likely to come out.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- rictic 2mo agoI'd be impressed with a touchpad and OS that can go from an actuation to a userspace process receiving a click event in 1.2ms. I'd expect something more like 10x that. My understanding is that most hardware samples between 90-130Hz, and even premium hardware only samples at 250Hz which would average 2ms before the kernel is aware.
- mrheosuper 2mo agochrome can detect my 1000hz polling mouse, but i bet there must be a buffer somewhere.
- omgtehlion 2mo agorecent chrome versions actually throttle these reports down to 60hz max, checked this on several systems and mice
- mrheosuper 2mo agoI see, but the path from hardware to userspace app should remain unchange, right ?
- Animats 2mo agoSo why does it take 5-10 seconds from card presented to accepted at Starbucks and CVS?
- kasey_junk 2mo agoUsually the dominant time is from POS to acceptor. These are frequently still on high latency links. Also a lot of times in person payment flows allow a lot more in their latency budget because it won’t impact the sale, you won’t walk out because of a second here or there, unlike online. So systems aren’t as optimized, they route to older systems, marketing or further risk checks are added, and a broader range of accepted services that have higher latency (ent/snap processors and the like).
- jameshart 2mo agoThis scenario does not include payment. Would be much more interesting if it did.
- paimapi 2mo agois it bad that while this does look like a really cool method to explain a complex topic, my instinct on reading mic-droppy, RLHF AI prose is to be dismissive? there's just something about the persistent mic drops and this-not-that writing that feels so cheap I think it's because the explainer is passive, there's no interiority, it tells and doesn't show. plus, stylistically, if this were rewritten in second person (like most explainers are) it would make it a heck of a lot more readable: 'You order a coffee on your coffee shop's tablet. 211.4 ms later you see 'Order Confirmed'. There's a world of complexity behind that status confirmation. Let's see how it all works.' etc
- magarnicle 2mo ago"mic-droppy" is the perfect description. Now I can imagine Claude sheepishly picking up the mic yet again after I correct it.
- nullsanity 2mo ago[dead]
- mlyle 2mo agoDismissive is appropriate-- "By the time the confirmation renders, the request and its replies will have crossed North America six times" 35ms times 6 is 210ms-- so just about physically possible with current infrastructure. But: this leaves no time for any of the hosts to do anything, or the wifi in the cafe, or whatever.
- imtringued 2mo agoNo, this site is awful. You read this sentence: >This website shows what happened in between. And immediately get shown an ad "how to build a backend framework from the wire up". The first thing you think to yourself is how does building a backend relate to a coffeeshop click? Why would you even have to click in a coffee shop in the first place? If you really insist on product placement, why not explain how your order page works instead? "the rules of this page" is a terrible wall of text that expects you to read carefully and memorize instead of using the scroll mechanism itself to show the clock in the center of the screen and then move it with a fluid animation to the top, so you notice it is there. Same problem problem with the time stop. You have to introduce the time stop mechanic as you go. "the cast" is terrible yet again, you've primed me to expect the clock to start and I scroll through the request and nothing happens??? Why emphasize the infrastructure at the end with text? Why are there six requests? You only need one HTTP request/reply and TCP does not have the concept of requests. The packet round trips created by TCP/TLS handshakes do not count as multiple requests. This explainer feels wrong from a technical perspective already . Then there is the fact that the text columns are incredibly thin with heavy vertical separation, there's an incredible waste of horizontal and vertical space to the point where you hardly get to read anything at all. You can divide the screen into 9 rectangles and only one of those is used. 90% of the screen is empty. It also keeps jumping from single column, to double column to single double column (yes) and left bound text. Not only does it not hook me, I'm having a hard time believing that the creator of this actually looked at the output or iterated on it at all.
- semiquaver 2mo ago> A problem repeatedly occurred on "https://200ms.thenodebook.com/#act-O-prologue” I find this usually is caused by being too clever with layouts.
- mrheosuper 2mo agoThe website is barely readable on my shitty screen.
- gregsadetsky 2mo agoAlso see this classic: https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when "What happens when you type google.com into your browser's address box and press enter?"
- jvanderbot 2mo ago> "The internet" Classic software engineer perspective. I have good friends who build their entire career between "ISP" and "Load Balancer"
- jmole 2mo ago[dead]
- sqemo 2mo agoGreat read. I was already familiar with the overall concept, but the step-by-step, chronological explanation made it much easier to understand. Highly recommended for infrastructure engineers, solution architects, and developers.
- hahahaa 2mo agoFine, but what is the journey of the p99.9 900ms request?
- bufio 2mo ago200 ms is very slow.
- hex4def6 2mo ago>touchpad controller >capacitance dip → interrupt raised >hid driver report: x 512 · y 288 · button 1 down >... >One millisecond in, the click has passed through four pieces of software and nothing has left the laptop. I'm going to press X to doubt. There's no way you're getting from "finger touching glass" -> "chrome seeing a click" in one millisecond. Heck, I know for a fact that even the cap touch controller isn't going to be that quick. I would believe it's closer to 40-50ms, E2E. Even if the captouch was instantaneous, 1ms latency latency is in the realm of RTOS, not a general-purpose OS feeding a bloated app like chrome.
- mrheosuper 2mo ago1ms latency is too much for RTOS, from ISR to the app code should be less than 1ms but bloated OS ? i have no idea
- hex4def6 2mo agoYou're right the kernel might be able to handle that pretty quickly, but I know from experience even good, ~200Hz sampling captouch system is 1/200 = 5ms worst case, 2.5ms avg. That's already 2.5-5x the budget and we haven't gotten off the display.
- ZenithBar 2mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- mparnisari 2mo agoGreat website! Seems like the web version of this book (which is highly recommended btw): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17985198-high-performance-browser-networking https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17985198-high-performanc...
- effseven 2mo ago[dead]
- chrismorgan 2mo agoI don’t know how much a human was involved in making this, but clearly not enough. Some parts of the timing it’s talking about make no sense, the ordering of some parts is incoherent, and it promptly goes into unreasonable and irrelevant detail while completely missing other actually relevant aspects of that detail. For example, “HSTS preload”: it’s utterly irrelevant, because you already know it’s HTTPS; and even if it were HTTP, you should talk about HSTS, the preload list is effectively just a prefilled cache; it then adds more to that cache as you visit sites that have HSTS headers. I’m very confident that if I looked further I’d find it riddled with errors. I just skimmed it and looked at a couple of the bits I’m most familiar with and immediately found notable errors.
- imtringued 2mo agoI looked at the beginning and it is already wrong. It talks about multiple requests and when you go all the way to the end, it suddenly talks about a single request.
- Method5440 2mo ago“On the wire, each label is stored with its length in front, 3 api 11 thenodebook 3 com 0, and the final 0 marks the end of the name, where the last dot would go.” Am I the only one that doesn’t think of this as ‘api.thenodebook.com.’? What does the LLM mean by the zero after .com marking where the last dot would go?
- rcxdude 2mo agoThe last '.' is essentially the equivalent of the first '/' in a file path: it refers to the root of the DNS and marks it as an absolute name (otherwise, in principle, it could be treated as relative even though it usually is not outside of the DNS machinery).
- dilyevsky 2mo ago> Its addresses are MAC addresses, serial numbers burned into each card at the factory. oof Nice idea, but execution could be better - way too many factual errors. Actually, considering it appears to be just 100% ai slop it's a little bit shocking how many just plain wrong statements it put out. Almost every section is at least a little bit off...
- codeduck 2mo agoWhy would no local cache on a laptop hold the IP address for the api endpoint if it's already open in the browser and being posted to?
- rockmeamedee 2mo agoI hate this. The style of LLM-written prose is unbearable, and I found several mistakes. This is "dazzle them with bullshit details" with no understanding behind it. I assume the book this post is marketing is also AI slop too and I lost respect for its author.
- cloverich 2mo agoI'm surprised at all the "200ms is slow" comments. I make many purchases online, don't we all? I can't remember the last time one took sub 1000ms; they usually take several. What are some of the websites you purchase from that truly complete a purchase in sub-200ms?
- VaporJournalAPP 2mo ago[flagged]