It would be great if most applications worked at human speed. Instead we have web applications taking 5 seconds to load what is basically 3 records from a small database.
...or "instant"(!) messaging applications taking gigabytes of memory and a full CPU core, and yet still can barely keep up with how fast a human can type.
I've often complained out loud with coworkers, while waiting for some horrible webapp to do its thing: "This computer can execute over a billion instructions every second. How many instructions does it take to render some formatted text!?!?"
While throughput is reasonably easy to optimize for, for latency you will havSoftware latency is a hard to optimize target. Throughput is much easiere to fight against each abstraction layer on your code. And that includes layers bolted on your OS and hardware.
Most of these applications spend a few 100 millisecond loading the database records, and an additional 4.5 second loading the 20 different trackers + advertisements on their website.
Depends what you mean by human speed. What's faster, a lower tech "human" operation like looking up a word in a physical dictionary (assuming one's handy), or looking it up on dictionary.com, assuming dictionary.com takes 5s to load?
I reckon humans can actually go MUCH faster than what their software allows today. I often feel frustrated by software on my various devices that make me wait around for non-network operations even though I pay a premium often for top of the line devices. Those little micro-frictions really mess with my mood.
What? 100ms is "human speed". When doing anything interactive the difference between 25ms and 5s is monumental. Even just for pressing confirmation buttons 5s is slow enough that you need some substantially faster reacting visual confirmation (loading animation or whatever) to satisfy humans.
5ms versus 5s is the difference between being tempted to check or think about something else or not. Multiply that option over and over with a repetitive task and anyone but your most disciplined monk is going to find themselves getting side tracked regularly.
5 seconds is probably fast enough to deliver the content to 80% of the people who need it. If that application has an acceptable bounce rate even with a load time of 5 seconds, then that might be the minimum acceptable human time.
I've often complained out loud with coworkers, while waiting for some horrible webapp to do its thing: "This computer can execute over a billion instructions every second. How many instructions does it take to render some formatted text!?!?"
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16001407