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by treis 2615 days ago
>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?
2 comments
AYBABTME 2615 days ago
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.

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sjwright 2615 days ago
If you’re serving so many elements that 5-msec-per improvements really accumulate, your problem is page complexity, not marginal latency.
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AYBABTME 2615 days ago
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.
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edmundsauto 2615 days ago
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.

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treis 2615 days ago
>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.

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edmundsauto 2615 days ago
> 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.

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