The Page Load Paradox | Hacker News Reader

The Page Load Paradox

blog.scoutapp.com

33 pointsitsderek2313 comments

Yes, speed matters. This is just anecdotal evidence, so feel free to dismiss it:

We recently switched hosting companies and our site load speed went from an average of 10 seconds to the new server speed of just under 1 second.

Our monthly revenue instantly doubled. People stayed on our site longer, they learned more about our products, and thus were more willing to shell over their hard earned cash.

Speaking as a consumer, if I went to a site that took 10 seconds per page load, I wouldn't feel like I was dealing with a professional organization. I'm not going to expect high-quality products if you have low-quality web hosting.

Exactly. The hosting didn't start off that slow. When we first purchased the server slice the average page load time was about 1.5 seconds. But as time went on, the hosting company overstocked their servers and load times inflated horribly.

By the way, this crap hosting company is MediaTemple.

As a MediaTemple customer since January 2007 I can vouch for this. Their hosting service isn't what it was when the Web was courting them during the Web 2.0 hype era. I still pay them to host my blog (on hiatus), but now I use WebFaction for current projects and could not be happier with their hosting or customer service. I strongly recommend them.

I think this is very important for web applications as well, not just for a page load time. Broadband may help with bandwidth, but latency remains the same.

I think it depends on what the site is being used for. If there is information on the site that I can't get anywhere else, I'd wait. However, if it's an online webapp with many similar competitors, speed is more likely to factor into my decision making.

Google is a champion speed and consider it a core-competency. I know that when building EveryMentor.com I did my best to keep it fast and lightweight and I am really proud of how responsive it feels. HTML requests are 260ms and after the initial jQuery/CSS caching, there are really few images to deal with either.

It feels blazing fast with Chrome and that is really important to me.

A lot of us have worked tabbed browsing into our workflow to a degree that the difference between 1 millisecond load time and a 5 second load time is negligible, since I'll spend enough time on the first tab to let the rest I've queued load up.

It's also worth noting that on mobile, the bottleneck is still the connection, not client or server side rendering.

I'll happily wait 20 seconds for gmail to load, since I'm not going to close it again until I reboot.

If I'm revisiting a site I know, I'll cut it some slack, and be pretty patient.

But.. if I'm picking off results from a search, the sites have mear moments before I hit that back button

Note that there is also an optimistic view on that issue. For instance, the same effect ensures that mobile phones aren't accepted to take too long to boot (compare their boot times to the 2-5 minutes which computers usually need). So I agree, it's all about what latency people are used to.

>compare their boot times to the 2-5 minutes which computers usually need

I thought my old Athlon 1.1GHz was slow but it boots in under 2 minutes (just), I consider that very slow.

I can't really understand why phones would take long to boot, restoring state from flash memory can't be that slow surely? Quick test for me, new phone Sony T715 is 12s and old phone Sony Z610i is 6s (rough numbers, to usable interface not including signal acquisition); seems longer than it should be.

> [...] boots in under 2 minutes

Well, I thought about the usual end-consumer computers.

You can indeed shorten it to 1-2 minutes if you use a slick operating system (my servers usually have that boot time), and I've been told that you can tune most BSD and Linux systems to boot in 20-30 seconds.

However, this is still worse than even the worst mobile phones.

>You can indeed shorten it to 1-2 minutes if you use a slick operating system

Which OS are you using that takes 5 minutes to boot (and what hardware)? I'm just using Kubuntu 10.04 with a pretty standard install (though I've stripped most unneeded apps). It did boot marginally quicker (as did my other comp) with 9.10; though shutdown now is very quick.

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