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4 Seconds Loading Time Is Maximum For Websurfers
nieske writes "Of course we all want webpages to load as fast as possible, but now research has finally shown it: four seconds loading time is the maximum threshold for websurfers. Akamai and JupiterResearch have conducted a study among 1,000 online shoppers and have found, among other results, that one third of respondents have, at one point, left a shopping website because of the overall 'poor experience.' 75% of them do not intend ever to come back to this website again. Online shopper loyalty also increases as loading time of webpages decreases. Will this study finally show developers of shopping websites the importance of the performance of their websites?"
Well, that was fast
It takes a lot longer than 4 seconds for a Slashdot story to load, particularly with the new AJAXy discussion system. I usually open up several things at a time in different tabs, which decreases the average loading time since I can read one thing while another loads. What browser were these people using?
Four-seconds-is-the-most-time-I-would-ever-spend-r eading-a-Slashdot-article-or-comment-so-I-ask-all- posters-to-please-make-their-points-quickly-and-su ccinctly-in-small-manageable-doses-ooh-look-there- is-a-shiny-object-on-my-desk-gotta-go.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Note that Akamai has a vested interest in this study. They would like to encourage more businesses to use their technology so that their sites load faster.
I am not saying that the study is biased, but one should at least consider that it is in Akamai's best interest to convince every site owner that they will lose customers if their site is not fast enough.
Let's all have a poll of our own now... how long does your fave shop's site take to load? Would you consider a switch?
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
Its not so much that the first page takes 4 seconds, but realizing that probably every other page will take at least that long. With broadband, we've become used to near instantaneous page loads. If a site doesn't load in about 2 seconds, especially sites I frequent, it usually won't load at all.
Now that this research is in, I predict that all website designers will realize the futility of flashy designs and instead remake their sites to be more like Craigslist or Google. I'm predicting an end to Flash and Javascript.[/naivete]
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
as the developer of http://www.djrickystone.com/ I have wondered if the 'kitch' 'aesthetic' nature of the site will retain loyalty despite the high load times.
i wonder if a study like this has been done outside of shopping sites?
p.s. If you hate flash do NOT go to the site I linked to.
-Sj54
Amazon still codes their pages so they come up "fast" on a 28.8 modem. Ebay is the same. Where as some sites are sold by flashy experiances, they are not. They want to keep the barrier of entry low so you buy from them, and the whole process is fast and easy. To do otherwise is simply bad business.
I'm still on dialup, you insensitive clod! (really)
Sounds to me like people are getting really impatient these days. I'm willing to wait up to 10 seconds to let a page load, and if it still hasn't, but is busy (instead of connecting again) I load another tab and occupy myself with something else.
However, four seconds sounds accurate for how long to wait until the page -starts- to load. If I have to wait longer than 4 seconds just to connect to a web server, I start to get impatient. If it takes much longer, I'll come back to it later and go do something else.
Either the summary is totally off, or this 'research' is total bunk.
Method of processing duck feet
People are still spending money on stuff like this?
Here's a question: is gmail.com the same as brochureware.com? Would a user visiting a web(2.0)-based application have the same load time expectations as visiting an about page of a company's website?
Of course the answer is no. People with half a brain start to sound like a broken record here when they say "This has no value. It all depends on the site's audience, not a general audience.", but that's because the people behind studies like this never listen.
Of course Akamai is going to say that... they're business model revolves around bringing data closer to web surfers in order to speed up busy sites.
That's kind of like two years ago (or so) when RedHat released a whitepaper saying linux has a lower TCO while simultaneously Microsoft released a whitepaper saying windows server has a lower TCO.
The only difference is, there's no one out there selling a service or product that slows down website access to provide a contrasting viewpoint. Well, none except maybe these guys.
One of the main reasons why I'm considering upgrading my 233-MHz laptop, is not because it's slow at doing heavy calculations (like Matlab, etc), but because it will soon to be impossible to surf the 'net. Not only are webpages growing larger and larger kB-wise, but they're also using increasingly more CPU resources when loading. Why is it necesary for my poor laptop to run at 100% CPU usage for a long time, just because I want to view a website? When gmail just came out it worked perfectly fast on my computer, but more and more javascript have been stuffed into it, so now it's almost useless for me. The tendency is same for many, many websites.
But for me the ability to sort through goods is the #1 priority. Yes I like to have a pretty site to look at but if I cannot find what I am looking for with a few simple queries then I am gone. Newegg is a fine example of a site where I can find what I want quickly. Tigerdirect is getting better. Dell is the worst. I have a theory that Dell is like many supermarkets, they rearrange stuff and make searching difficult so you see the maximum number of items before finding what you are actually looking for.
Web designers, if you want business, make it easy. I dont really think most people go to sites just to browse. Most of the time we are there with a purpose and as an ADD generation we want it quickly or we will move on.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
In my experience developers are not the problem. The initial site is fast and responsive. The traffic grows and stuff keeps getting added until the point where the site needs either an upgrade in infrastructure, an interface redesign or at least a partial rewrite of the software. The management-level decision to authorize such changes has for as long as i've been developing website always taken way too long.
I just can't imagine that someone who is used to using, say, Amazon.com, is going to blink, much less suddenly switch to another vendor, if they have a 15 or 20 second page load every once in a while. Now, sure, if they did it all the time, I'd start to wonder. But since a site like Amazon trades on the fact that it's a central clearing point for a vast selection of inventory, there's a built-in barrier to trying someone else based on the assumption that they are less likely to have it. There may also be barriers to switching based on unfamiliarity with alternate vendors, etc., but previous experience, if not outright customer loyalty and perception of being able to deliver the goods, really drive retention a lot more than how fast you can always get that page up.
:)
Now, whether Akamai is being disingenuous or something else... I really couldn't imagine
For good measure, I also tested with IE6. I got 12, 12 and 11 seconds.
What is the experience of other users?
My specs:
- office LAN connected to SURFNET in the Netherlands.
- FF2.0
- WinXP SP2
Performance on other websites:- http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 2 secs
- cnn.com 2 secs
Regards(Score:5, Not Funny)
Requiring visitors to use Flash also doesn't make sites very popular with me.
Perhaps I'll decide to never read a press release hosted by Akamai.com anymore.
[quote]To view the advanced features and functionality of akamai.com, Adobe Flash Player 8 is required.[/quote]
"before potentially abandoning" is the actual phrase used in their press release. As in, people think they would think about abandoning a site after this much time, and said so when taking a survey (but were not exposed to this load time to see what their actual reaction would be). So this is not nearly as clear or useful a metric as the summary would have it appear.
I'm on dial-up so I expect some long load times. However, if I get a flash webpage, I close it - I'm not messing about waiting an age for it to load. I'm not looking for some crappy 'multimedia experience' - I just want information, to buy something or whatever. I'm getting Broadband soon and I'll still be closing anything flash sites, no matter how fast they load. It's the web equivalent of powerpoint poisoning, and the worst thing is virtually every flash page I've seen hasn't been skippable.
It's the old rule of thumb: If the service is waiting for me, it's fast. If I'm waiting for the service, it's slow.
Wow, a web caching company has determined that customers abandon a site that is slow.
That is not an issue for me. My highest chance of leaving is determined by when in the buying process, the site provides total price including all shipping, handling, taxes, and acceptance of coupons codes. If they need my name and address I may leave depending on if they have a shipping link or general shipping info somewhere on the site that I can reference first. I will ALWAYS leave if they require CC or payment information before providing the total price or even a hint of shipping costs.
I guess they need my address prior to calculating shipping and handling charges if they do not have flat rates but a place to enter my just my zip code should be enough IMHO.
For a good example of providing a good experience is NewEgg. They includes the shipping costs right next to the product descriptions without even having to go to a cart first.
I view the delay or confusion of shipping and handling charges to be an attempt to hide a total cost or get you to get so far that they figure you will not back out. I will back out and take my business elesewhere.
Almost like the the Ebay sellers that charge $20 to ship a motherboard (at least they are up front about it though).
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Tabbed browsing largely negates this. It takes me more than 4 seconds to digest any given page, so even if I am looking at only one slow site, I can still flip back and forth between two tabs, reading the one while the other loads.
-
This is totally off-topic here, but it's a small little detail anyway: Did you know that "akamai" is the hawaii. word for intelligent, clever?
Don't deserve the title. I've been designing and developing websites since 1997 and I have ALWAYS worked to a maximum of 10 seconds for a page to download - even back in the day when everyone was on modems . People come to your site for a purpose, all the flashy crap designers love to put in is just a barrier between the user and that purpose.
My Portfolio
That's probably at least as important. I've visited websites that don't have efficient ways of finding what you're looking for. Either you have to drill down through too many submenus or everything is lumped together and you have to tediously browse through about 50 pages of selections. Provantage is a good example of not being very browsing friendly.
AJAX suffers from some severe performance problems.
We use what amounts to a self-developed Web forum system on the intranet at the firm I work for. It's something we've been using since the mid-1990s, has excellent performance, but it's starting to look obsolete. So we've been looking into alternatives.
We looked into using several AJAX-based Web forum systems, from several different vendors. After trying them all, those of us who were working on the project were quite disappointed. The performance of the AJAX-based products was absolutely terrible. Like you've experienced with Slashdot, loading times of 5 to 10 seconds were normal.
What's more, we had the hardware to back this up: a quad Opteron system, with 4 GB of RAM. We were running Linux, with Apache as our web server. We were able to serve no more than 15 concurrent requests. Our existing system, running FreeBSD on a mere 475 MHz AMD K6-II computer with 1 GB of RAM, was able to handle about 1300 concurrent requests.
After some profiling, we came to the realization that it was the AJAX applications that were causing the problems. And it wasn't just one of the applications; it was all of them. The overhead of the asynchronous calls was far in excess of what we were lead to believe by consultants who were pro-AJAX. They claimed that we'd see a reduction in bandwidth usage, but we actually saw the opposite.
Another problem we ran into was web browser support for AJAX. Firefox was terrible on Windows and Linux. Internet Explorer was slightly better, but still rather poor. The only browsers that performed well were Konqueror, Opera and Safari. We're mostly a Windows house, so Konqueror and Safari are out of the question. The IT staff who manage our internal network don't want to use Opera, for reasons not known to me. They've been using Firefox, but Firefox does not allow for a suitable user experience.
In the end, we decided not to transition away from our existing system. The current AJAX-based offerings are terrible, and what little benefits they do offer in no way make up for the massive increases necessary in hardware and bandwidth.
I'm here waiting for the thread to load up, click reply and decide to wri.. oooh, shiny thing!
Task Mangler
...welcome our new impatient overlords.
I scratch my head in wonder as people who would otherwise drive across the city to pick up their widget, now refuse to wait more than 4 seconds for their online shopping experience to load.
Life needs more saving throws.
I thought the load time only was important when it came to porn. That is; the profit of the site is related to the amount of time the guy browsing it can hold his load and click all the random CLICK ME-adds.
And really. 4 seconds is a long time! Damn these people must have a good sex life.
If man has no tea in him, he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty
In my situation, a 5MB/s internet link and a Windows 2K machine with the latest patches and Firefox 2.0, the Gmail interface takes more than 4 seconds. I am not impressed with this. But when I boot into Ubuntu, the same Gmail takes less time than on windows, which is good enough.
Stats for http://slashdot.org/ -
Request Count: 78
Bytes Sent: 50.871
Bytes Received: 436.121
RESPONSE CODES
--------------
HTTP/200: 78
RESPONSE BYTES (by Content-Type)
--------------
application/x-javascript: 288.162
application/x-shockwave-flash: 22.517
text/html: 17.348
image/png: 11.410
~headers: 21.942
text/css: 37.599
text/javascript: 9.026
image/gif: 28.117
That certainly takes longer than 4 seconds.
throw new NoSignatureException();
This is one tool I really find useful for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/433/
If you can't stand flash, then its for you.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
That's funny, it's 1 second longer than what I always have heard it is....
Am I the only one who gets absolutely infuriated when it the g-mail on my google home page lags a second before coming up?
One thing I see a lot of developers do which really kills me is to actually load initial content with AJAX. This is the reason the Google home page is slow. Apparently other developers disagree with me, but I've always generated the initial load data server side on the original request and then used AJAX for updates only. AJAX shouldn't be generating your entire page layout from a call in the body onLoad.
Thanks,
bb
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
From the Wikipedia page about XMLHttpRequest:
I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, and I don't think you do, either. Of course Internet Explorer supports AJAX. If it didn't, serices like GMail wouldn't have even been created in the first place. You do realize that the vast majority of the people in the world use IE, right? You won't see a technology become as widespread as AJAX has become if Internet Explorer doesn't support it.
Amazon still codes their pages so they come up "fast" on a 28.8 modem. Ebay is the same.
Right. So the reason that ebay comes up in 3-6 seconds on my 1.5Mb DSL connection is why? I'm sorry but I HATED ebay when I had dialup (less then 7 months ago) because it would take 20 seconds or more before i could view ANYTHING, not just all the pictures and stuff.
Ebay is by far the WORST site for load times of a "major" site on dialup.
The (somewhat controversial) web-usability expert, Jakob Nielsen, has had much to say about response times. From his 1994 book, Usability Engineering, he states, "10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user's attention focused on the dialogue." (reference: http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html). You may have heard of him through his 2000 book, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. There has been a lot he has written that, in light of new methodologies, still makes good sense/practice.
It really depends on content. I'm sure many of us would be willing to wait far longer than that for a paid adult site to load their content, right? Also, if you're conducting some sort of research in a specific topic it does not really matter how long a site takes to load so long as you hope it'll have what you're looking for. Now, if I got to buythispoop.com and the thing last forever ( >4 secs.) every time I change pages or whatever, then you bet i'll get my cyber booty out of there and go somewhere else I can access fast. Not a great "research" when you tihnk about it. Would you stay at a store where it takes 10 seconds for a sales person to come to you when you ask for help? Same rules apply online--only faster.
Myspace has proven this theory, or study rather, wrong entirely. I've sat for minutes (at least it felt like it) waiting on a myspace page to load on a high speed connection...all because someone told me to look at this or that on the god foresaken website. Though I saw on CNBC where Myspace traffic was falling at a near rapid pace...and all I can say is...about time. I could rant and rant about Myspace, but it would only be treading water, and completely irrelavant to the article.
Why he is sitting at score:0 I don't know. He's right, not friendly, but right. Wish I had a few to hand out today, because +1 informative seems to hit the spot on parent post.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
I bet the some people are happy to wait longer than 4 seconds for his favourite pr0n to download. This is slashdot after all.
Registration causes me to abandon online store sites. I have a credit card. We've been working out the bugs for 50 years. Credit card sales work pretty well already. I am not going to waste a lot of time registering for your damn website in order to qualify to spend my money with you. Sorry. If you really really really really really really want me to do your market research for you I demand a discount - maybe free shipping, which is my other pet peeve. It really doesn't cost $15 bucks to pick, pull and pack that widget. I'll trade a few seconds of load up time for that. Now get to work assholes. I'm the customer, not you.
"Currently, the minimum goal for response times should therefore be to get pages to users in no more than ten seconds, since that's the limit of people's ability to keep their attention focused while waiting." - Jakob Nielsen March 1st 1007 - Source: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703a.html
:-D
Loading times have always been a factor. Instant is usually better imo
Personally I don't care about load times unless they exceed more than 20 seconds. It's the time it takes me to actually understand/find anything that bothers me.
My college's student portal was like that. Sure it would load quickly, but it was a pain in the rear to navigate. The splash page was plastered with options, tickers, sidebars and crap that you could care less about. The categories to navigate through were even worse, and completely unintuitive.
That's why sites such as Google or Thottbot appeal to me. You load them and there aren't any bells and whistles flying everywhere distracting you from what you're actually trying to do. I'd easily take a page that loads in 20 seconds over one that loads in 4 if it simply cut the crap.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
I've kind of realized this since I've first used hotmail back in '96. Luckily, someone finally has research to back me up. Now, why is this headlines on /.?
Microsoft: "You've got questions. We've got dancing paperclips."
How clueless and anti-Microsoft must you be, to not know that what we now call AJAX is a fucking MICROSOFT INVENTION! Who the fuck do you think came up with the XmlHttpRequest anyway, you idiot?
Too many fuckwads like yourself are responsible for the distribution of STUPID on this site, and limiting the amount of knowledge to be disseminated. How many N00bs read a post like yours and go away knowing LESS instead of MORE?
Thanks, motherfucker.
The new engine from Mozilla (found in the Firefox 3.0 nightly build trunk) seems to render pages almost instantly. However, some pages seem to load slowly (sites in Quirks mode). Perhaps it is a mixture of site and render engine. Sadly for the webowners, people disregard the sites before trying their sites in another browser.
Clicked pie.
I'm guessing the Dept.of pulling random numbers out of your arse were responsible for the research.
"so how long do you think people wait for a page to load?"
"iuno... 4 seconds?"
"sounds about right..."
God Be Gone
Not ebay.ca, it's like watching paint dry waiting for those bloody pages to appear. Not that I mind though, we hates ebay.
Salut,
Jacques
Doesn't sound like the Amazon and Ebay sites I visit on my 56K modem.
I ran a little test using Safari's show page test load window option from the debug menu, results below.
All of these new web 2.0 sites are slowing everything down, they often look cluttered, put more stress on the browser, and overall make a crappy expirence. I am happy with 10-20% images and 80-90% text.
Or was every comment after about the first half dozen off topic?
/* somewhat functional - fix later */
This is the best argument for getting old web application and ajax-ize them, reducing load time and getting a better user experience.
-- Giovanni Daitan Giorgi http://gioorgi.com http://www.siforge.org
THE WEB CACHE COMPANY
Nuff said. Tagged as FUD. Jupiter Research go down as spin for hire.
Deleted
Hmm... 10 seconds load time for Amazon.com on a 1.5Mbit DSL line. That's just for the home page. Trying to do a search or actually buy something has been nothing short of agonizing ever since they added "A9". I'd hate to think of what it is like on a modem.
Yet the only company that actually kept it below 4 seconds was Zappos.com. Yeah, I admit I'm patting my team on the back :)
Cheers.
Will this study finally show developers of shopping websites the importance of the performance of their websites?
Developers already know this. But at the end of the day, we're paid to implement the ill-considered plans of marketers and designers.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I remember taking a web design class years ago at Purdue that called for a 3 second load time as people clicked away after that. Whats funny is that modems were still in heavy use at the time so you could pretty much only load some text and a small pic and there goes your 3 seconds.
Are web sites (and the corresponding fuckwit designers) who assume that a browser window is exactly 1024 pixels wide... I happen to run my process bar down the right hand side rather than at the bottom of the screen, this takes away perhaps 100 pixels and the number of web sites this fucks up is absolutely staggering. btw having the process bar at the side allows you to read the name of each window no matter how many of them there are, it makes far more sense than having it at the bottom.
Deleted
2. They gathered this data by asking people "Typically, how long are you willing to wait for a single Web page to load before leaving the Web site? This is a very inaccurate measure - most people have no idea how long 4 seconds is when answering a question like this (obviously they would if they stopped and counted it out). They just pick something that sounds reasonable. A true study would have instrumented some web sites and gathered abandonment statistics for various page times.
3. The "overall performance" that caused people to say they would abandon a site included "poor error messages" and "site crashes."
I absolutely agree that sites work well and be fast. However posts like the one above will result in the "4 second rule" being carved into stone. It will get repeated around the internet and be built into business plans. All of a sudden, 4.1 seconds will become unacceptable. It's not that simple. Also, please note that this study was commissioned by Akamai, whose business is website acceleration. They have a vested interested in convincing you that you need to speed up your web site.
I just refreshed Slashdot's homepage and FasterFox (http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/) reported a load time of 9.545 seconds. Good thing my ADD is only mild or I'd... oooh, pretty flashing banner ads...
$ man woman *
-bash:
While Akamai might have a vested interest in the results from this study, its outcome is similar to non-public data I've seen elsewhere. At least for the general public on a large site, making the site faster directly results in users staying longer and returning more frequently. If they make money from their users in some way, either by selling them something or showing them ads, improving their page load times usually directly results in more money.
Aaron
Somewhere on your home LAN. Your web page latency will reduce substantially.
Deleted
Actually, Office Depot pulled it off too, but they were in a different category.
Cheers.
Is that before or after the "Looking up slashdot.org" message disappears? Seriously, for a site you've never visited, it can easily longer (much longer) than 4 seconds, just to look up the DNS record.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
valid HTML, or XHTML even renders a lot faster than tagsoup.
Akamai's page is broken.
(valid) CSS allows for smaller (X)HTML files and more efficient caching.
Again Akamai's page is broken
Ah well, maybe some manager types throw out the annoying Flash (intro) based on the article
That site hasn't loaded in anything close to 4 seconds in the last eight years. I curse them to hell everytime I have to go there.
"It was like that when I got here."
I downloaded and read the whitepaper that is linked from that article. The summary is an obvious skewing of the actual findings to focus on Akamai's business. A couple key examples are: "Which of the following factors are most influential in your decision to continue shopping with an online store where you have shopped in the past? (Select all that apply.)" - 65% said good navigation, page load time was 8th of 13 with only 40%. "Typically, how long are you willing to wait for a single Web page to load before leaving the Web site? (Select one.)" - 21% said 3 - 4 seconds, however 30% were willing to give the page 5 - 6 seconds (broadband numbers) and another 38% were willing to wait more than 6 seconds.
Clones are people two.
Wow, this is pretty neat.
For telnet a *much* higher level is used, at less than a second, or people get annoyed at the slowness.
Have you read my journal today?
Good luck doing research for a car without Flash. It's abysmal.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Gonna let ya in on a little secret. They got these things, see, they're called "servers". Websites live on these things. Sometimes, lots of websites can live on one server. Then, they got all these "users" trying to look at the websites on the "server", and sometimes things get messy, or at least a little congested. (See "Tubes" for more advanced technical info.)
Ok, all snarkiness aside, what it boils down to is simply this. It does not matter one damn bit *how* many zillion terraquads-per-nanosecond YOUR connection can handle, the *server* can only dish out so much per second to all the folks making page requests to sites on that server. Period. End of story. You may have an Internet connection so goddamned fast the packets travel back in time, it won't make any difference. Which reminds me, <looks around again> there's also this thing called "point of diminishing returns", and it's got tons of uses in all kindsa fields, not just Teh IntarTubes... but if ya wanna know more, you'll hafta buy a watch.
For this study to be actually useful they would have needed to have individuals visit various sites and state whether or not the loading time was acceptable. The load times for the pages would have to be cataloged within the browser without the "consumer" able to know how long it really took. Only then might we actually get some useful information.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. ~Albert Einstein
For non uS customers, the most bummer factor is that almost every online shop accepts only US-issued CCs, no matter wether they are Visa, MC or AMEX. For Buddha's sake! You can't even get an iTunes account cause they accept only US cards!! And we are talking about Apple, not some little store.
Should read:
4 seconds HOME PAGE loading time is max for ONLINE SHOPPERS.
I use some web applications that take 25 seconds to load (yeah ouch but I have little choice).
I usually wait 10-15 seconds on some remote and uncommon pages that often take time to load
(typically research or government sites).
If I'm really desparate, I can use the google cache.
There are more useful 'metrics' to explore than homepage load times for shopping sites.
-Eric
If I go to the front page of an online newspaper or similar site, I expect it to take long to load. If I click an article link, my patience is very thin because my target is simple article text, possibly with an illustration. Same with an online store. Also, there's a few tricks that lets the browser render it before it's loaded all the items - for example setting an image's height and width attributes. Not everyone has learned that yet. Also it depends on how much meaningful content there's on a page. If I have to visit a [break] new [break] page [break] for [break] every [break] sentence, I'm a lot less patient than if you just load it in one big honking page that I can scroll.
In short, measuring cost (time) without measuring benefit (content) is meaningless. If google's search page took four seconds to load, they'd be a dead duck. Other pages couldn't be rendered in four seconds with a Core 2 Quad and GigE, but are still highly successful. The pages you want to check is where the user asked you for something specific, in which case you'd better deliver ASAP without crapping up the page with everything he didn't ask for. Pages that are slow, I can live with. Pages that are slow, deliver little and waste time on meaningless stuff I don't.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The reason for this is that Surfers attention span is also about four seconds, so if the page takes longer to load, they forget what they where doing...
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Not to argue that nothing on the web should take more than 4 seconds to load (on _second_ load), but notice who sponsored the study - Akamai. It's like if Microsoft sponsored a study "proving" that Linux sucks.
Caching is your friend. If you cache, don't forget to version your stuff as well:
<script src="foo.js?d=md5sum-of-the-script"></script>
And do this with everything you cache - css, xml, xsl, whatever.
I sit on a gigabit fiber connection. :)
*Nothing* takes that long to load...lol.
As for all the people saying they still use dialup, why?
Because I'm in the middle of Africa?
I share a 750mb/s sattelite downlink with about 1000 people. It costs around $3500 a month. It wasn't much more expensive than the 256kb/s ISDN line that we used to use. (our uplink is still ISDN)
That covers the school, but us staff can get dial-up for about US$20/month which is cheap for this country.
Or I can use my GPRS phone at 20/- per megabyte (That's about US 28c/mb).
One thing I do look forward to about moving back to Canada is my DSL internet.
This all begs the question: what is the psychology behind the three or four second user patience threshhold? My vote is that after half a dozen four second waits, the distract-me-from-life-by-buying-more-crap circuit begins to lose its grip, and a wee murmur of "what the heck am I doing wasting my life on this garbage" penentrates the dim folds of consciousness. This is not a case of humans engaged in rational activity. These are just shopaholics regulating their emotional state the same way most true geeks regulate their mental electrolytes through beverage consumption. You could do the same study on the coffee maker at work: fresh brew delay vs oh-screw-it-Starbucks-needs-my-money-more-than-I-
I read that 30 secs is approx the max time people are willing to wait for an elevator. I thought that was impatient until now. Though if you are going through dozens of pages and you can scan them be eye in a few secs then those delays become annoying fast.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The danger of conducting surveys is that the answer to a question often times varies from what a user will really do in the real world.
Take the topic of "...the New Threshold for Acceptability..." as an example, the survey asks the question: "Typically, how long are you willing to wait for a single web page to load before leaving the site?" 31% of users said that they were willing to wait less than 5 seconds for a page to load before leaving. I am willing to bet that if you were to evaluate the metrics of online retailers you would find that the number of people leaving your site after a sub 5 second page load is less than 31%.
On a similar note, this survey fails to tell us whether this is something a user is willing to put up with only once or on every page load. It is my suspicion that a one time page load of 5 - 6 seconds is not going to cause "A full one-third of online shoppers with a broadband connection..." to abandoned the page; however, I would be willing to accept that if every page took 5 seconds or more to load on a broadband connection you would see a large amount of users abandoning the site.
Finally, I found it very interesting that the survey limited the answers to 6 possibilities (sub 1s, 1-2s, 3-4s, 5-6s, 6+). In my opinion, they made a big assumption in choosing 6s as the threshold of acceptability...where did that number come from/why was it chosen as the cap? I think the survey would have been able to benefit from having a higher range, perhaps to 10s as suggested by Jakob Nielsen (http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html)
I work for a company developing thier website. Our website is currently based around old-school ASP, and while I would love to change this platform to something more up-to-date, it isn't going to happen any time soon (ie, I am one programmer and there are well over 100KLOC of ASP involved, not too mention tons of MSSQL-specific SQL that would need to be converted, mainly for date handling reasons). I am stuck on this platform for the time being. I did not choose this platform, that was done for me a long time ago.
We have more than enought processing power to handle our site, but we have an issue with long page load times - from the front site to deeper pages. I have isolated the problem to our heavy use of a function which essentially does a singleton query (ie, given a table, field, and record ID, it returns the data value in that field - ie; SELECT field FROM table WHERE id = ???).
This form of query/function (which is actually done in a database wrapper function - so only the function call is used everywhere - if I can speed it up, the entire site benefits) was implemented due to another issue, which, when I first got here and saw what was happenning, made me say "Wha?" and try to do it the proper way, only to get stung by the problem that this solution was to fix. What this problem was is as follows: If you try to issue a SQL select on our system to return multiple fields from a table (ie, SELECT field1, field2, field3 FROM table WHERE ...) - sometimes, the data returned could be accessed (ie, var1 = Recordset("field1"), var2 = Recordset("field2"), etc) just fine, but at other times (seemingly, maddeningly - at "random" intervals), only the first field would have data in it, and all the other fields would return empty string or null values! We don't know what causes this or why (I suspect some form of field ordering in the SELECT vs. the order of the fields in the MSSQL table - but I am not sure), but by using singleton selects, this problem is avoided (because there is *always* data in the first field), at the expense of speed. Unfortunately, at this point, even if I found out how to keep the problem from arising and could use the proper SQL queries, there are simply way too many places to change for it to be practical (it would still be a HUGE job to perform to mod that much ASP code).
From what I have googled and researched on the interweb, singleton queries using ADO recordsets should never be done - they are very slow. I have heard that using an ADO command object, either coupled to the SQL select with parameter fields, or by using a stored procedure, is a better and faster method than using a heavy recordset. However, I have not been able to get either of these methods to work properly - I either get no data back (empty strings), or errors. I am not absolutely sure if it is my stored procedure or what (although, it seems to return data OK if I run it under Query Analyzer). What is interesting, even though it fails and doesn't return data, I seem to get the same performance (timing-wise) as the regular singleton query (ie, using an ADO command object with a stored procedure seems as slow as using an ADO recordset object and a query). I am not sure if this is because of the failure of returning data, or if I did get it working, if it would run faster.
Seriously - I wish I could convert everything over to Linux, Apache, PHP (or Python), and MySQL or PostgreSQL - but that isn't happenning - we don't have manpower or resources to throw at such a project (plus, considering new development and fixes on the current codebase, it would be a constant game of catchup and patching, even if we have another developer handy to take up this issue alone).
Does anyone here have any reasonable ideas or solutions I could possibly try? Does anybody know why we experience the random data droppage when not using singleton selects? Does anybody have any ideas on how I could speed this beast up? Or, am I simply bailing water out of a sinking ship?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wikipedia is completely correct in this case.
Microsoft did develop XMLHttpRequest. Internet Explorer was where it encountered its first widespread usage. But being the first implementation that is widely used is completely different from being the first implementation ever.
As Wikipedia correctly states, it was first implemented in Outlook Web Access 2000, but it did not gain widespread usage. Only after Internet Explorer implemented it did it become widely used. Thus Internet Explorer was indeed the first widely deployed implementation, as that W3C document correctly states. But it was not the initial implementation, by any means.
an (not to be names 3 letter corp) impressivly extensive unpublished work i was involved in with focus groups concluded no such 4 second cutoff. Instead we found a curve/ range plot that depiced the average case over time. The closest to had numbers that this study reported was a poorly names "rule of 9's" essentially if the above the fold content: - appeared within 9 seconds, then 90% of viewers would proceed forward. - appeared after 9 seconds but within 18 seconds, 50% would end the broswer session. and less than half of the resulting group would proceed forward now that lowered expectation has been set. - appeared after 18 seconds then only the dialup-acclamated would persue further. neary 70% dissmissed the session after seeing the content. It turned out that expectation mattered more than arrival time. That is the curve that should be determinted. If the focus group participant knew that the page they wanted was the only source for what they were seeking, then they would wait. If the needed source exclusivity was uncertain then they were 2 time more likely not to wait, and more importantly they did not persue transactions. it all goes deeper than that but basically persuit and persistence mapped over the time to arrival, depicted a situation that was based on satisfaction of pre-set expectations, and not any strict set time limit... dont hammer me on that , it was the data we got. It may eventually go to print, but i doubt it and i cant say more. IMHO 4 seconds is bullshit.
Short answer: because the United States is a lot larger with a much lower population density in most areas than Europe, Japan, and pretty much every other Westernized country in the world. I'm not kidding when I say there are many people who live in locations where the closest grocery store is 20 miles away or more.
The UK has 93,278 sq miles of land - slightly smaller than our state of Oregon - whereas the state I live in - South Dakota - has 77,121 square miles. It is only the 17th largest state of 50. The UK's population density is 649 people/mile, whereas South Dakota has a density of 9.95 people/mile. There's a big difference there, one which the lack of wealth distribution/state telco funding can't or won't make up for - meaning the economy just can't support or rationalize high speed out to the boondocks.
By the way: the Western world is not "the rest of the world". Most of the world is still on dialup.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
No wonder my page views have droped significantly on Myspace, maybe I should get rid of the huge background image that makes it so you can't read my text, and all those slide shows of picutes I have on there, oh and that automatically playing song, the video on there, and...
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
Especially sites with a lot of bloat and bad html like Kotaku.com.
10 seconds to load a bunch of stuff, and then 11 more to actually load images. Heck, sometimes the images don't load, and they break their own site.....
Apdex is an interesting way of scoring application time, which assigns response times a score from 0 to 1 depending upon whether they meet their "tolerance" goals or not. For any transaction, there's an number T which is the upper limit that users will tolerate for response time, and a number F, where F=4T, that is the number at which people consider the system to be failing. In the study mentioned it sounds like T=1(calculation of F is left as an excercise for the reader). Once you have these numbers, you collect statistics on the response in three buckets: total transactions, satisfied count where response is T and F. The Apdex number is (satisfied count plus half of the tolerating count) divided by the total responses. The advantage to this system is that it gives you a number telling you how well something is working in relation to its goals, and it works no matter what the units of time used are.
4 seconds? Pfft, sounds like web users need a good dose of humility, courtesy of my 2.5Kb/s dial-up shared over 3 computers! I reckon I might start a web server as well, waddya say?
It added insult to injury to find out that our neighbours were on a ADSL-enabled exchange, while we're on the outermost rim of ours. With the state's water supply between it and us, of course. So technically it was good news when it was announced that they were going to set up wireless broadband instead of small-ranged ADSL for us. It's just that time goes by, and that's all that's happened...
That's a nice internet-generated income you got there. Be a shame if something happened to it.
Sheesh. It takes three of those four seconds for Earthlink nameservers to resolve your URL...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
here i cant get my paws on a 4 mbps Cable connection thanks to the corrupt mayor of this city,that demands from the cable company a bribe do the cable reach here :/
Man, that sucks. Surely your state has a telecommunications ombudsman or something similar? (I linked to dictionary.com 'cause I'm not sure what your local term is...) That mayor dude is holding back progress, man.