Comment by justin66 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justin66 | Hacker News Reader

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> Let’s be honest, none of us are sitting around waiting for our complex IDEs to render characters on the screen. No one really cares if it’s 1ms or 30ms or even 200ms.

Waiting longer for a character to render to the screen than it takes to send an IP packet to a different continent and receive a reply may make you happy for some reason, but UI research indicates most people will react negatively to this.

It's worse than that. With something like Visual Studio, for example, we are sitting around waiting for local variables to update in the debugger's watch window, if we're experienced enough to know that we need to do that. This kind of thing is a genuine user interface bug: if a person doesn't realize what a slow, awful piece of software they're dealing with, they'll step step step past a variable update in the debugger, never see it happen on their screen because that only works when you pause and give the watch window time to catch up, and assume it's their program that has the problem.

People can get acclimated to dealing with very slow software, but they shouldn't have to when all the hardware performance to make it better already exists.

> No one really cares if it’s 1ms or 30ms or even 200ms.

You would definitely care about 200ms latency.

Typing at 100 wpm is a character about every 120 ms.

A 200 ms delay would be interoperable and a 30 ms delay would be a 25% penalty to see the characters appear.

Stella Pajunas 1946 record of 216 wpm (54,000 strokes per hour, 900 per min, 15 per second, 66 ms) is on average. She must have typed considerably faster some of the time. Anything over 40 ms is probably noticeable.

https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/75268195-miss-stell...

Most wouldn't get near 1/3 of that but when the professionals say your shit doesn't work it does mean something. Trying to increase your speed using a system that cant keep up adds unacceptable annoyance.

I hereby coin the Pajunas rule at 40 ms.

Have you looked at actual end-to-end latency numbers for common operations? I’m not talking about theoretical transfer times between buffers or carefully structured synthetic benchmarks.

Using fast-twitch PC games as the gold standard, most people are looking at 60-80ms of latency on a local PC. The online game streaming services hover around 150ms, which is noticeable but still entirely usable. (Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-how-stadias-input-lag-compares... )

That’s why I say that 1ms vs 30ms of terminal latency is a non-issue. When I’m typing, I’m not on a tight feedback loop with each character. I know what I’m typing, so I’m not waiting for specific letters to appear on the order of a blink of an eye.

Most of us are using 60Hz monitors (17ms per frame) with terminals that have 20-30ms of lag, with OSes that introduce slightly more delay, and so on. Then we SSH into remote servers with 50ms, or 100ms, or 200ms of latency or more. The total delay between hitting a key and seeing the letter on screen could easily be 200ms on the regular for an SSH session, yet our typing isn’t falling apart.

That PC Gamer article is not an endorsement of the idea you're pushing that all this latency doesn't matter. "Singleplayer games are mostly fine to play through the cloud, but any cloud gaming platform is going to be a no-sell for people who only play multiplayer games, even with a good connection."

I don't want to give that magazine article too much credence, but when it comes to user experience, we as an industry ought to try for more than "mostly fine" or "isn't falling apart."

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