Am I crazy if for something like an online purchase, I kind of expect it to take a second or two to process the payment, so I would assume something went wrong if it was 200ms?
I’ve definitely had in the UX side a situation where the PM/Owner types asked me to introduce a delay in the “disabled button with loading spinner” such that the user sees it for a visible amount of time because our API was too fast for their taste.
That was terrible, I used to always turn it off. It's like speaking one word and the person interrupting you based on the prefix you had uttered so far... every single darn word. Imagine writing "how do I kill" and having it assume you meant a living being rather than a program.
> At 2000ms, without output, you wonder if it crashed. (That was the old one.)
That must have been a really, really long time ago indeed, because there are very few websites now that take less than 2000ms to load. The linked site didn’t even come close on my phone (probably 3-4 seconds), and I most certainly didn’t wonder whether it had crashed.
While I also enjoyed it very much, some thing are strangely ordered and not how I would expect someone with such knowledge of all the moving parts in a request, would build such a site. So for me it feels like an LLM has build it and the human with the prompt saw it and said "eh, good enough".
Agreed. This reeks LLM writing with no human oversight, or at least a human with no writing experience. The text underneath “The Click” is an immediate giveaway:
> Five milliseconds of hardware and browser bookkeeping before a single byte leaves the laptop.
I don’t even know how to describe it, but the “[…] before X” sentence style stands out to me.
This is very nice and for me especially because I've tried to think about it before your post. I think you can write a very long book if you go really into detail such as the underlying physics for wifi starting from maxwell's equations, how specific CPU architectures execute one instruction at a hardware level and maybe more in depth discussion about the math and cryptography within TLS.
Back in the day "what happens when the user types a url in the address bar and press enter" used to be an interview question, and I remember nobody has ever mentioned the hardware and keyboard keys and interrupts. This post does! Pretty awesome detailed view of a request lifecycle.
I still like this question because of exactly what you mentioned. What the interviewee does and does not mention can give you a fair bit of insight into their priors.
The US is so big, that 50 ms is physically not possible for everyone.
This is something that not everybody is aware of. When I as a German build something for germans, everyone who needs to wait longer than 100 ms for a request, is rightfully mad. But when I want to serve the same stuff to americans at the same speed, I have to build something completely different and much more complex.
Just to be the "actually..." guy: People notice 200ms delay. It's just that in cases it doesn't cause any bad feelings."
At 50ms, you notice.
At 400ms, you care.
At 2000ms, without output, you wonder if it crashed. (That was the old one.)
That must have been a really, really long time ago indeed, because there are very few websites now that take less than 2000ms to load. The linked site didn’t even come close on my phone (probably 3-4 seconds), and I most certainly didn’t wonder whether it had crashed.
Not seeing the final completion of the request.
Your phone probably showed something after you clicked the link but before the page rendered: Link highlight change, a progress bar, etc.
If your phone had crashed and the browser was non-responsive, you would have recognized it quickly. More quickly than the page load time.
Gave me roller-coaster ride across 40 years of gathering knowledge about computers and networks.
I'm very jealous of whoever created that. Well done!
Homer explains it best https://youtu.be/Tmx1jpqv3RA
> Five milliseconds of hardware and browser bookkeeping before a single byte leaves the laptop.
I don’t even know how to describe it, but the “[…] before X” sentence style stands out to me.
Proceeds to use that color for tooltips, text color, headers, and more
This was a really cool visualization but that ^ bothered me way more than it should have.
But really, great page.
Someone new could learn from it the basics of what to check when debugging web.
Somewhat ironic, given how many contracts here seem to come with 3 months notice periods.