200 Milliseconds

jonahrd 6 minutes ago |

Am 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?

felooboolooomba 46 minutes 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 38 minutes ago | |

I 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 29 minutes 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.

Aurornis 14 minutes ago | | |

The 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.

bloppe 28 minutes ago | | |

GitHub

beders 38 minutes ago |

This 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 7 minutes ago | |

While 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".

inerte 10 minutes ago |

Back 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 7 minutes ago | |

I 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.

viggio24 27 minutes ago |

Wonderful page, congratulations! navigating to the end takes time but the contents and the presentation are great

3dedb728-3f77 39 minutes ago |

200ms 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 4 minutes ago | |

The 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.