Importance of Response Time
Time is scarcest and most valuable commodity
- Studies in late 70’s and early 80s showed the economic value of Rapid Response Time
- 0-0.4s High productivity interactive response
- 0.4-2s Fully interactive regime
- 2-12s Sporadically interactive regime
- 12s-600s Break in contact regime
- s Batch regime
- Threshold around 4-5s complaints increase rapidly.
- Voice has threshold around 100ms
Notes:
Note that the TCP/IP timeout caused by a packet loss is of the order of 4-5 seconds.
For some newer Internet applications there are other thresholds, for example for voice a threshold appears at about 100ms - above that point, the delay causes difficulty for people trying to have a conversation and frustration grows.
Also see: http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/papers/LatencyQuest.html