Perhaps the two go hand in hand. I say evidence suggests that is not only plausible but perhaps common. Something is indeed wrong. We tolerate servers respon

Perhaps the two go hand in hand. I say evidence suggests that is not only plausible but perhaps common. Something is indeed wrong. We tolerate servers responding to trivial requests in hundreds of milliseconds (sometimes even greater than 1,000 milliseconds!) Here is an off-the-cuff--not cherry picked--screen grab from Firebug [1] showing 342ms of waiting for the server to respond to a relatively trivial request of listing summary information about approximately 20 entities that are presumably stored as rows in a database table from a popular web site. This type of delay is my chief complaint about a site that I am otherwise very fond of. Until this first response is delivered, the user is just plain waiting. Static assets should also arrive quickly, but I am more forgiving of them arriving gradually to decorate the page. Yes, it's certainly possible the database server is the origin of this pain. And web developers should profile their applications to gain insight. Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, many profilers incorrectly conflate ORM or platform database driver time with genuine database time. Given what we have seen from frameworks and platforms making database queries and processing responses through ORMs, I know that MySQL (and other data platforms) on decent hardware can respond to tens of thousands of such trivial queries per second. Meanwhile, some application stacks reach reduced responsiveness and worsened user experience well before the database's CPU and disk register more than a blip. [1] http://imgur.com/OXyhFbO http://imgur.com/OXyhFbO