Very insightful. "More benchmarks also measure throughput more than latency.": Yup, latency benchmarks are really very hard, especially when humans are involv

Very insightful. "More benchmarks also measure throughput more than latency.": Yup, latency benchmarks are really very hard, especially when humans are involved (UI/UX), due to biases and the way perception and cognition quite often try to adapt sparing us "the worst of latency" but at the same time leave us with a gut feeling of "lag". The journey J. Carmack undertook to find and work around latencies for the Oculus Rift is good example for all this, i think. You can't do this for each and every app to give all users this "snappy" feeling... especially when a huge system like "the internet" is involved. I believe there is also "latency creep": even if "a system" has low latency at the beginning, operating it, maintaining it and especially scaling it will more easily accept increased latency than lower throughput... up to an threshold of course when the system becomes "apparently and unbearably slow" (still not the case for google, facebook etc. i guess) Add servers to a farm because the median req. latency increased by 30%? Hmm... Add servers to a farm because the number of users increased by 30%? Sure! ;) So most probably facebook, yahoo etc. are missing serious absolute latency SLAs [1] and those huge organizations as a whole tend to neglect them until things break... they don't care about "slow(ish)". [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-level_agreement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-level_agreement ps: it's "funny" to see the gaming big-biz industry fighting this: they are huge organizations willing to accept "slow" if the money comes in right, at the same time some of them are in a market where the customers are much more sensible to this issues than the typical facebook is slow poster.