What is considered a good response time for a dynamic personalized web application

Question

For a complex web application that includes dynamic content and personalization  what is a good response time from the server  so excluding network latency and browser rendering time    I m thinking about sites like Facebook  Amazon  MyYahoo  etc   A related question is what is a good response time for a backend service

User · Answer

I have been striving for  lt  3 seconds for my applications  but I m a bit picky when it comes to performance   If you ask around  they say that people start to loose interest in the    7 second range  by 10-15 seconds you have typically lost them  unless you REALLY have something they want or need

User · Answer

Of course  it lays in the nature of your question  so answers are highly subjective   The first response of a website is also only a small part of the time until a page is readable usable   I am annoyed by everything larger than 10 sec responses  I think a website should be rendered after 5-7 sec   Btw  stackoverflow com has an excellent response time

User · Answer

Our company has a 5 second response time standard limit  and we aim for 2-3 seconds in general  This accounts for 98  of page loads  A few particular tasks are allowed to go up to 15 seconds  but we then mitigate that time by putting up a page and refreshing every 5 seconds telling the user that we are still trying to process the request  That way the user sees that something is happening and doesn t just leave  Although  considering that I work on a website whose users are forced to use for business reasons  they aren t going to leave  but they are capable of complaining quite loudly   In general  if the processing is going to take more than 5 seconds  put up a temporary page so that the user doesn t lose interest

User · Answer

I think you will find that if your web app is performing a complex operation then provided feedback is given to the user  they won t mind  too much    For example  Loading Google Mail

User · Answer

There s a great deal of research on this  Here s a quick summary      Response Times  The 3 Important Limits      by Jakob Nielsen on January 1  1993      Summary  There are 3 main time limits  which are determined by human perceptual abilities  to keep in mind when optimizing web and application performance       Excerpt from Chapter 5 in my book Usability Engineering  from 1993       The basic advice regarding response times has been about the same for thirty years  Miller 1968  Card et al  1991           0 1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously  meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result    1 0 second is about the limit for the user s flow of thought to stay uninterrupted  even though the user will notice the delay  Normally  no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0 1 but less than 1 0 second  but the user does lose the feeling of operating directly on the data    10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user s attention focused on the dialogue  For longer delays  users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish  so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done  Feedback during the delay is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable  since users will then not know what to expect

User · Answer

Not only does it depend on what keeps your users happy  but how much development time do you have  What kind of resources can you throw at the problem  software  hardware  and people    I don t mind a couple-few second delay for hosted applications if they re doing something  complex   If it s really simple  delays bother me

User · Answer

We strive for response times of 20 milliseconds  while some complex pages take up to 100 milliseconds  For the most complex pages  we break the page down into smaller pieces  and use the progressive display pattern to load each section  This way  some portions load quickly  even if the page takes 1 to 2 seconds to load  keeping the user engaged while the rest of the page is loading

User · Answer

2 to 3 seconds

User · Answer

It depends on what keeps your users happy  For example  Gmail takes quite a while to open at first  but users wait because it is worth waiting for

[performance] What is considered a good response time for a dynamic, personalized web application?

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