

The Page Load Paradox - itsderek23
http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2010/06/17/the-page-load-paradox

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wyday
Yes, speed matters. This is just anecdotal evidence, so feel free to dismiss
it:

We recently switched hosting companies and our site load speed went from an
average of 10 seconds to the new server speed of just under 1 second.

Our monthly revenue instantly doubled. People stayed on our site longer, they
learned more about our products, and thus were more willing to shell over
their hard earned cash.

~~~
lotharbot
Speaking as a consumer, if I went to a site that took 10 seconds per page
load, I wouldn't feel like I was dealing with a professional organization. I'm
not going to expect high-quality products if you have low-quality web hosting.

~~~
wyday
Exactly. The hosting didn't start off that slow. When we first purchased the
server slice the average page load time was about 1.5 seconds. But as time
went on, the hosting company overstocked their servers and load times inflated
horribly.

By the way, this crap hosting company is MediaTemple.

~~~
coderdude
As a MediaTemple customer since January 2007 I can vouch for this. Their
hosting service isn't what it was when the Web was courting them during the
Web 2.0 hype era. I still pay them to host my blog (on hiatus), but now I use
WebFaction for current projects and could not be happier with their hosting or
customer service. I strongly recommend them.

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rlpb
I think this is very important for web applications as well, not just for a
page load time. Broadband may help with bandwidth, but latency remains the
same.

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yosho
I think it depends on what the site is being used for. If there is information
on the site that I can't get anywhere else, I'd wait. However, if it's an
online webapp with many similar competitors, speed is more likely to factor
into my decision making.

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bryanh
Google is a champion speed and consider it a core-competency. I know that when
building EveryMentor.com I did my best to keep it fast and lightweight and I
am really proud of how responsive it feels. HTML requests are 260ms and after
the initial jQuery/CSS caching, there are really few images to deal with
either.

It feels blazing fast with Chrome and that is really important to me.

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sprout
A lot of us have worked tabbed browsing into our workflow to a degree that the
difference between 1 millisecond load time and a 5 second load time is
negligible, since I'll spend enough time on the first tab to let the rest I've
queued load up.

It's also worth noting that on mobile, the bottleneck is still the connection,
not client or server side rendering.

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fizzfur
I'll happily wait 20 seconds for gmail to load, since I'm not going to close
it again until I reboot.

If I'm revisiting a site I know, I'll cut it some slack, and be pretty
patient.

But.. if I'm picking off results from a search, the sites have mear moments
before I hit that back button

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vog
Note that there is also an optimistic view on that issue. For instance, the
same effect ensures that mobile phones aren't accepted to take too long to
boot (compare their boot times to the 2-5 minutes which computers usually
need). So I agree, it's all about what latency people are used to.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>compare their boot times to the 2-5 minutes which computers usually need

I thought my old Athlon 1.1GHz was slow but it boots in under 2 minutes
(just), I consider that very slow.

I can't really understand why phones would take long to boot, restoring state
from flash memory can't be that slow surely? Quick test for me, new phone Sony
T715 is 12s and old phone Sony Z610i is 6s (rough numbers, to usable interface
not including signal acquisition); seems longer than it should be.

~~~
vog
_> [...] boots in under 2 minutes_

Well, I thought about the usual end-consumer computers.

You can indeed shorten it to 1-2 minutes if you use a slick operating system
(my servers usually have that boot time), and I've been told that you can tune
most BSD and Linux systems to boot in 20-30 seconds.

However, this is still worse than even the worst mobile phones.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>You can indeed shorten it to 1-2 minutes if you use a slick operating system

Which OS are you using that takes 5 minutes to boot (and what hardware)? I'm
just using Kubuntu 10.04 with a pretty standard install (though I've stripped
most unneeded apps). It did boot marginally quicker (as did my other comp)
with 9.10; though shutdown now is very quick.

