"Latency: Why You Should Worry and What You Can Do About It"
summary
Argues that latency—not bandwidth—drives user delay, with measured round trips around 430 ms on mobile and ~250 ms on DSL, so multiple resources add seconds to page loads; notes TCP slow start and even modem NICs adding 12–14 ms each. Recommends caching, parallelizing, prefetching and “cheating” by moving latency out of the visible path. Releases a real tool, Boomerang on github.com/yahoo/boomerang, a BSD JavaScript beacon that measures page load, bandwidth order of magnitude and HTTP/DNS latency and is extensible via plugins.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (23)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:24Bandwidth vs Latency
- 1:02Bandwidth is an easy problem
- 1:15bandwidth doesnt matter so much
- 1:29below the surface
- 1:48everything has latency
- 2:03latency across the web
- 2:45blink
- 3:10ISPs
- 4:05Light is too slow
- 4:24Not enough data
- 5:15Latency
- 5:30Read it
- 5:52JavaScript
- 6:18Computer History
- 6:59Browser Cache
- 7:13Parallelization
- 7:57Yui
- 8:07Prefetch
- 10:05Measuring Performance
- 10:37Boomerang
- 13:40Becoming a Community
- 14:03Questions
related talks
06mWorld's Simplest Latency Simulat
57mHigh Performance Mobile
52mPanel 2: Network
28mThe Browser Hackers Guide To Instantly Loading Everything
23mThe Short and Happy Lives of TCP and HTTP Requests
34mOnce More with Feeling
55mLet's make the web faster - tips from trenches @ Google
01h 01mWeb Performance Deep Dive