How much of a latency snob are You (web)?

Me, I think somewhere around 400ms between clicking/tapping on a thing on some website, and the results of that going to a backend and back and being fully rendered and fully shown to me is what I begin to call “waiting” and start to consider “slow”. I’m indiscriminate of whether its networking latency or tons of JavaScript or large image packs or whatever; at the same time <100 end-to-end, I think it’s quick.

I’m a European, I know there’s people living in Middle East, India, Africa, New Zealand and Australia, South America, (… and other places, duh) that are considered to be more on the “outskirts” of the internet…

Are you from one of these places?

Regardless of where you’re from, what’s quick in your opinion, and what’s slow?


(I’ve been living working in a bubble for a while and I’m trying to get my bearings wrt. how tech literate folks outside of my own bubble view this kind of thing).

When thinking about latency this story occasionally crosses my mind (talking about the short lived Youtube Feather beta) - Page Weight Matters. Lots of users will simply give up or not try if they experience issues, so thinking about cachable content and latency is a good thing.

My latency reduced by 10-20ms when I went from ADSL to VDSL, and honestly I didn’t really notice. It takes 50-100ms before it doesn’t feel instant.

I’ve learned how to adapt to about 400 ms ping back in the WoW heyday.

There wasnt really much of a choice here on Southeast Asia, going to the Australian/Oceania server.

I am totally latency-averse. The faster technology gets, the more I want it to get faster still. It’s not just webpages. Its waiting for a directory of images to load or a program to start. I’m genuinely considering whether I can take advantage of the massive RAM in this machine (64GB) to build some kind of OS RAMDISK. In fact, if anyone knows of any project that has ever done something that bonkers, let me know.

Short answer - yes. Give me everything instantly. I’m not even a gamer. I just want to click something and not have time for my mind to start wandering waiting for the result.

my ping is 18ms has been for 10+ years. never paid much attention to it coz never had to.
then again I’m on fibre and always have been so never new anything with lower latency.

I remember getting schooled online with a 400ms ping.

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I’d say if a site is still struggling to load other areas of a page in terms of borderline dropping to dialup speeds, it makes you wonder a little bit of internet congestion or bad web development such as loading overkill high resolution images instead of leaving them as a clickable to see full size. Beyond the Daily Mail fail being popular for a great example of ad bloat on a page, some sites load up too much auto-play ads or popular headline video clips and the whole site is painful to stay reading anything from it.
The only thing I miss on ditching DSL for cable is my ping was lower due to the telco having a better backbone, ping/latency gets jumpy at off-peak hours on cable.

Reading between the lines here, the consensus seems to be that serving off CDNs would be very much appreciated here… ?

Many of the US/North American sites I visit heavily use CDNs, the tricky part is if you visit overseas sites they’re less likely to have North America based CDN so everything is back to the late 90s/early 2000s. The upside is being on the east coast is Europe is fairly close in terms of backbone connections so the latency isn’t too bad–as long as I stick to French & German sites everything is fairly snappy. Slowness wise I cringe visiting sites based in Greece & Italy, it really feels like going back to early Bell Atlantic era DSL(640 download & 90 upload kbps)