Ajax Performance

Oops, make that 4 seconds

Looks like my algorithm for calculating user-acceptable latency needs to be updated. Akamai says it’s now 4 seconds, at least for retail sites.

I’m sure increasing broadband adoption plays a huge role in the downward trend of user toleration for latency, but I also expect that Ajax is a driver as well. Ajax gives developers finer grained controls for hiding network latency from the user, and the technique is mainstream enough that users can’t help but include their experiences on speedy Ajax sites in their expectations.