[Negitivefrags]

I think the biggest tool is higher expectations. Most programmers really haven't come to grips with the idea that computers are fast.

If you see a database query that takes 1 hour to run, and only touches a few gb of data, you should be thinking "Well nvme bandwidth is multiple gigabytes per second, why can't it run in 1 second or less?"

The idea that anyone would accept a request to a website taking longer than 30ms, (the time it takes for a game to render it's entire world including both the CPU and GPU parts at 60fps) is insane, and nobody should really accept it, but we commonly do.

[azornathogron]

Pedantic nit: At 60 fps the per frame time is 16.66... ms, not 30 ms. Having said that a lot of games run at 30 fps, or run different parts of their logic at different frequencies, or do other tricks that mean there isn't exactly one FPS rate that the thing is running at.

[Negitivefrags]

The CPU part happens on one frame, the GPU part happens on the next frame. If you want to talk about the total time for a game to render a frame, it needs to count two frames.

[mjevans]

30mS for a website is a tough bar to clear considering Speed of Light (or rather electrons in copper / light in fiber)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light

Just as an example, round trip delay from where I rent to the local backbone is about 14mS alone, and the average for a webserver is 53mS. Just as a simple echo reply. (I picked it because I'd hoped that was in Redmond or some nearby datacenter, but it looks more likely to be in a cheaper labor area.)

However it's only the bloated ECMAScript (javascript) trash web of today that makes a website take longer than ~1 second to load on a modern PC. Plain old HTML, images on a reasonable diet, and some script elements only for interactive things can scream.

    mtr -bzw microsoft.com
    6. AS7922        be-36131-cs03.seattle.wa.ibone.comcast.net (2001:558:3:942::1)         0.0%    10   12.9  13.9  11.5  18.7   2.6
    7. AS7922        be-2311-pe11.seattle.wa.ibone.comcast.net (2001:558:3:3a::2)           0.0%    10   11.8  13.3  10.6  17.2   2.4
    8. AS7922        2001:559:0:80::101e                                                    0.0%    10   15.2  20.7  10.7  60.0  17.3
    9. AS8075        ae25-0.icr02.mwh01.ntwk.msn.net (2a01:111:2000:2:8000::b9a)            0.0%    10   41.1  23.7  14.8  41.9  10.4
    10. AS8075        be140.ibr03.mwh01.ntwk.msn.net (2603:1060:0:12::f18e)                  0.0%    10   53.1  53.1  50.2  57.4   2.1
    11. AS8075        2603:1060:0:10::f536                                                   0.0%    10   82.1  55.7  50.5  82.1   9.7
    12. AS8075        2603:1060:0:10::f3b1                                                   0.0%    10   54.4  96.6  50.4 147.4  32.5
    13. AS8075        2603:1060:0:10::f51a                                                   0.0%    10   49.7  55.3  49.7  78.4   8.3
    14. AS8075        2a01:111:201:f200::d9d                                                 0.0%    10   52.7  53.2  50.2  58.1   2.7
    15. AS8075        2a01:111:2000:6::4a51                                                  0.0%    10   49.4  51.6  49.4  54.1   1.7
    20. AS8075        2603:1030:b:3::152                                                     0.0%    10   50.7  53.4  49.2  60.7   4.2

[hinkley]

In the cloud era this gets a bit better but my last job I removed a single service that was adding 30ms to response time and replaced it with a consul lookup with a watch on it. It wasn’t even a big service. Same DC, very simple graph query with a very small response. You can burn through 30 ms without half trying.

[javier2]

its also about cost. My game computer has 8 cores + 1 expensive gpu + 32GB ram for me alone. We dont have that per customer.

[oivey]

This is again a problem understanding that computers are fast. A toaster can run an old 3D game like Quake at hundreds of FPS. A website primarily displaying text should be way faster. The reasons websites often aren’t have nothing to do with the user’s computer.

[Aeolun]

If your websites take less than 16ms to serve, you can serve 60 customers per second with that. So you sorta do have it per customer?

[avidiax]

It's also about revenue.

Uber could run the complete global rider/driver flow from a single server.

It doesn't, in part because all of those individual trips earn $1 or more each, so it's perfectly acceptable to the business to be more more inefficient and use hundreds of servers for this task.

Similarly, a small website taking 150ms to render the page only matters if the lost productivity costs less than the engineering time to fix it, and even then, only makes sense if that engineering time isn't more productively used to add features or reliability.

[hinkley]

Lowered expectations are come in part from people giving up on theirs. Accepting versus pushing back.

[antonymoose]

I have high hopes and expectations, unfortunately my chain of command does not, and is often an immovable force.