[sparkman55]

There's a difference between requests that the user "expects" to take a long time, and those that can never be fast enough. For example, POSTs, credit card transactions, and things like Wikipedia edits generally have lengthy forms prior to the request, and the user can tolerate a correspondingly-lengthy response time. I prefer 2s as a target for anything like that, and rely on a queue for asynchronously processing anything that takes longer.

For GET requests, particularly those reached by clicking a link from elsewhere on the site, faster is better... Luckily, many of these types of requests can leverage a cache.