[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.