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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?
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According to Google, the average response time should be under 200 milliseconds as it gives the feeling of an instant response. A web response time ranging between 200 milliseconds and 1 second is considered acceptable as users still likely won't notice the delay.
The general rule of thumb is to optimize to around 1 second response time. This metric is related to the number of transactions or calls over a certain period of time. It is critical because you want to make sure that as the load increases, your application performance doesn't degrade.
A one-second response time is generally the maximum acceptable limit, as users still likely won't notice a delay. Anything more than one second is problematic, and with a delay of around five or six seconds a user will typically leave the website or application entirely.
As an example, if your customers are reaching you over email, anything within 24 hours would be considered to be a good average response time. But on social media, a good average response time would have to come under 60 minutes, no more. For phone calls, three minutes is a good average response time."
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.
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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.
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