Re:Google and Microsoft Cheat on Slow-Start. Should You?
by kragen on Friday November 26, 2010 @06:24PM
(#1943664)
Yes, of course, because network latency is probably almost the same to almost all sites to you. So the vast majority of pages take 400ms or whatever to load, and you don't think anything of it. You only notice when you hit a site that's out of the ordinary — whether it's Google loading in 85ms by using IW9, or Twitter taking multiple seconds to query the snail farm or frozen molasses or whatever it uses for its database now that it's dumped Cassandra.
If IW9 or IW10 gets widely adopted, you'll find yourself thinking "this website is slow" when you visit the rare backwater that doesn't use it.
This is almost always the case when I think "this website is slow", though. When HN is slow, it's not because of some added network latency, but because something is making HN take 3 seconds to serve up my "threads" page, or 2 seconds to successfully post my comment. Same with "reddit is slow", or "this Wordpress blog is taking forever to load" or "Twitter spins the 'working' icon for 2 seconds when I click on that 'retweets' thing in the sidebar before returning anything". Those things are really common in my experience, and those rather than network round-trip times are by far the biggest and most annoying slowdowns, at least in my browsing.