Comment by Veratyr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Veratyr | Hacker News Reader

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> I really want more evidence of the importance of performance in web systems (to justify my hobby, if for no other reason), but things from ten years ago just don’t cut it.

> Can we please stop citing articles from ten years ago and cite some studies that aren’t more than two years old?

Could you explain why? New data is good, sure but why should we disregard old data? I think instead of asking for people to simply discard old data, you should point out the issues you believe the data has so that they can be addressed (with newer data if necessary).

Anyhow, from https://riteproject.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/fact-sheet.p...:

- "In 2008 the Aberdeen Group found that a 1-second delay in page load time costs 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and a 7% decrease in searches that result in new customers."

- In 2009 Microsoft Bing found that introducing 500ms extra delay translated to 1.2% less advertising revenue.

I also found a whitepaper from 2010 done by Gomez.com that shows how speed impacts various metrics: https://github.com/JasonPaulGardner/po4ux/blob/master/InfoPa...

There's also an article from 2013 that's only loosely related but shows that reducing TTFB latency can increase search result rankings: https://moz.com/blog/how-website-speed-actually-impacts-sear...

> Also I’d be interested in more geographically diverse results.

I'd love these too, let me know if you find them.

The situation has changed. The nature of people’s consumption of the Web is different now, especially with the take-up of mobile browsing in the last couple of years. (The change in the nature of consumption on that count in particular is why I would like to see results from the last year, especially if they’re segmented by device.)

People depend on the web more than they did, so they might be willing to wait for things longer—or even just be resigned to the web being slow. Or perhaps the increased number of providers means that they won’t be willing to wait as long. I don’t know.

It does seem to me that the precious few studies that there are from recent times haven’t shown as severe a drop-off as ones from ten years ago did. But then the ranges of the results are so far out of my experience in non-US countries that I don’t feel I can judge it.

What I do know is that I have had people complain of the age of the data I cited within the last couple of years, when citing the traditional examples of Amazon and Google. Their age and the indubitable ecosystem changes since their time make me a little leery of citing them now, because after due thought, I agree with the objections.

As I say, I want performance to be a commercially valuable factor, because it would justify one of my favourite two topics in IT. I just want us to be using solid, dependable studies of the matter so that we can prove our point without reasonable doubt, and justify expenditure on improving performance, rather than aged studies which are open to quibble.

> People depend on the web more than they did, so they might be willing to wait for things longer—or even just be resigned to the web being slow. Or perhaps the increased number of providers means that they won’t be willing to wait as long. I don’t know.

It is hard for me to disregard those big names and their claims, especially since I have no direct experience in working for any of those companies for me to say otherwise.

On the other hand, in my purely anecdotal world of friends, family, and colleagues, I have never seen/heard of such behaviors. I doubt any of them even realize what 100ms is, let alone abandon their purchase on Amazon because of that delay. Most people can't even react in 100ms to brake their cars.

I really have to wonder if we have causation vs correlation going on.

I think citing data before the wide spread uptake on mobile is non-representative of the modern use of the web.

But it's probably very reasonable to believe that people's expectations of a faster response time has only risen since 10 years ago.

If I had to make a guess whether the same studies performed 10 years ago were performed today, whether the drop in page views would increase or decrease with slower response time, Id guess that today you'd have even fewer page views than 10 years ago.

I don’t believe it’s reasonable to assume that, having presented an alternative view that I find plausible in other comments in this thread. I hope that people’s expectations have increased, but I don’t believe it’s a reasonable assumption.

We need data.

There is lots of recent data out there. The general trend is that those findings from the mid 2000s hold even more true today. People are much more sensitive to latency, while the problem has gotten harder due to last mile flowing through congested air. https://www.doubleclickbygoogle.com/articles/mobile-speed-ma...

The entire premise of Google AMP and Facebook's Instant Articles is predicated on performance. Speed matters.

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