Latency is funny, it is so because:<p>* It is additive. It is necessary for just one component in the chain to add latency (monitor refresh, uncompressing, a bad cable modem, a bad router in the path, overloaded server, bloated JS code in the page). It is very hard to remove (one can argue impossible, but I am thinking of a multi-path set up with redundant hardware or network connections)<p>* Even though we can process teraflops per second on home GPU cards, our websites load about as a fast as they did 10 years ago.<p>* Border-line imperceptible UI or audio latencies still lead to bad user experience. They might not even know why they don't like it but in an A/B test they would pick the faster more response one. This was the case with Android vs Apple up until not too long ago. Even tiny UI jerkiness is enough to annoy a large number of users.<p>* OS and whole software stacks are usually designed for improved throughput not low latency processing. It takes tuning (proc and sys params) or even installing a special kernel to get better latency support for low level code.<p>* More benchmarks also measure throughput more than latency. Software is often picked and compared based on throughput, latency is second citizen most often. In a sequential setup for example, the two are compliments of each other, the more requests per second, the lower the latency of each request. It is only in concurrent and parallel contexts when latency starts to behave widely different. Send 100 requests at the same time towards the server? What happens? Do 50 get processed in 1ms but the rest block for 25ms?<p>* Low latency and liveliness has to be baked into the innards of the system/VM/framework. Depending on what is picked (and it often is picked based on throughput) a lot of time might end up being wasted fighting latency in a highly concurrent situation.
Designers aren't the only ones with work to do.<p>CDNs appear to be messing with performance in ways that aren't really transparent to users or content providers.[1]<p>We need better tools than speedtest sites. We need a way to see an ISP's provision of popular sites over time.[2]<p>Or just encrypt everything and bounce it through proxies or route anonymizers, make that standard. Either way.<p>[1] <a href="http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/how-to-stop-youtube-sucking-windows-guide/" rel="nofollow">http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/how-to-stop-youtube-sucking-wi...</a> ; <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/13kmvd/have_time_warner_internet_but_can_barely_stream/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/13kmvd/have_time...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.youtube.com/my_speed" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/my_speed</a> may be an example worth following for Netflix, Vimeo.
As a Canadian I notice as 2 consecutively ranked queries:<p>"Why are Canadians so rude"<p>"Why are Canadians so friendly"<p>And I'm suddenly reminded of Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" segments. And my guess is that for the majority of these queries, it's because the person has 7 different toolbars loaded into IE. IE8 if we're lucky, but probably IE7. Maybe IE6. Plus they probably have a ton of autostart crap on their computer and don't know how to differentiate between "my computer is slow" and "the web is slow."
Block all advertising, tracking an analytics, and a considerable part of the web becomes much faster.<p>The amount of worthless crap that comes with a simple web page where only a bit of text is relevant is staggering.
I believe this is one of the most, if not <i>the</i> most, under-appreciated "features" of websites and software (all types, including games).<p>It <i>directly</i> affects usability and therefore user engagement. And that means it directly affects the bottom line for most companies.<p>But most companies fail to see or ever really do anything about it.
I'm pretty sure 95% of those searches are people googling "why is X so slow" when they are having connection issues, as opposed to wondering why in general a service is always so slow.
tried "Why is my computer " or "Why is my car"?
It's just some pattern picked up by the search engine. no thing is fast enough.
This should apply to games too lol. I hope one day we can rid the world of the 'load screen'! Perhaps with more SSDs and developers putting effort into streaming (both from net and hard-drive), it'll be possible ;)
Because some people use 1MB+ .png images to measure latency of involuntary testers (visitors)?<p>(the OP contains: <a href="http://lognormal.net/boomerang/config.js" rel="nofollow">http://lognormal.net/boomerang/config.js</a>)
It's slow because it's text based. I think there could be advantages to switching to compiled html or any other open binary page format. It would be less flexible, but at least it would be less abused: no more pages and pages of CSS, weird js widgets, blurbs of html. Compressing html with gzip is not that much efficient either.<p>I don't think it's a great idea, but in some case it would sort of force everyone to make content that is just lighter.