High Scalability recently posted a monster of an article with facts about how latency directly affects the bottom line of businesses on the Web, and best of all, plenty of advice on how websites can go about to reduce latency.
A few quick facts that jumped out immediately:
- Amazon has found that every 100 ms of latency costs them 1% in sales.
- Google has found that an extra 500 ms in search page generation time made traffic drop by 20%.
- Slow sites have higher customer defection rates.
The article focuses mostly on how latency issues apply to websites and web services. It pulls in information from a lot of different sources and covers the following areas:
- Sources of latency
- Downsides of latency
- Managing latency
- Latency reduction tips
There is a lot of interesting information in there, so brew yourself a cup of coffee and start reading. 🙂
A big thank you to Todd Hoff for putting together another hugely informative article. You might want to check out the rest of the High Scalability website as well. It’s an entire website focused on “building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.”
