[an_account_name]

No, this absolutely checks with my experience - I chase 5 and 10ms improvements all the time because we've measured and know it increases conversion.

But it makes sense, too: if the metric here is average latency, that doesn't mean that some users didn't see a much more dramatic increase. Every tiny bit of frustration removed from the experience adds up.

[treis]

>No, this absolutely checks with my experience - I chase 5 and 10ms improvements all the time because we've measured and know it increases conversion.

You've measured and know that a user seeing a 905ms load time converts more than one seeing 915ms?

[AYBABTME]

The latencies stack up for any web page. It's not like "oh this file was served 5ms sooner", it's an accumulation of latencies over all assets, and the interactions, that are required to present an experience to a user.

Also, latency measured at the server is amplified once its received by the browser. And when the user's connection isn't great, all this is worsened. It quickly adds up. In fact, it doesn't "adds" up, it "multiplies" up.

[sjwright]

If you’re serving so many elements that 5-msec-per improvements really accumulate, your problem is page complexity, not marginal latency.

[AYBABTME]

Most pages nowadays are spamming requests to backend services, for business logic or not, that's just reality. Barely any actual real world money making website is going to have < dozen requests per page, and won't need a user initiated page load every few seconds to minutes.

[edmundsauto]

A 10ms average improvement could mean 1 in 1000 customers went from 10s to 1s without any other change to other customers.

This is easily possible if you have a highly distributed customer base, and/or some small segment of your customers don't have good upstream peering with your provider.

[treis]

>A 10ms average improvement could mean 1 in 1000 customers went from 10s to 1s without any other change to other customers.

Which is why I asked the question in the way that I did. I buy that a slimmed down webpage loading 10 ms faster on average will increase conversions because that makes the site usable for the visitors on bad connections. Moving to a CDN doesn't have that impact. It shaves off 10-100ms across the board.

[edmundsauto]

> Moving to a CDN doesn't have that impact. It shaves off 10-100ms across the board.

I think this is where we disagree. I've seen (firsthand and through analytics) situations where using a CDN can dramatically improve response time in a small subset of customers (while also getting the across the board win for most customers).

I've also seen CDNs (Amazon's in the early days) that were signficantly slower than direct to linode, even with a warm cache. It's a weird world, and packet routing is hard.

[Rafuino]

What kind of storage do you use when chasing the 5-10ms improvements? I ask as someone working on super fast storage and memory and it's not always easy to find people who are aware of the differences in latency. I imagine you're already on NVMe SSDs, but if not, I'd be curious why (i.e. is software more of the issue than hardware?).