Is there some industry standard for unacceptable webapp response time?

Question

There's a cots (commercial off-the-shelf) application that I work on customizing, where a couple of pages take an extremely long time to load for certain distributions of data. (I'm talking approximately 3 minutes for a page to load in this instance... and the time is growing exponentially).

Clearly this is unacceptable but are there studies out there where I can point what acceptable response time is?

I'd like some good studies possibly that discuss response time.

See here: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/164175/what-is-considered-a-good-response-time-for-a-dynamic-personalized-web-applicat](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/164175/what-is-considered-a-good-response-time-for-a-dynamic-personalized-web-applicat#164237) — warren, Oct 08 '08 at 20:48

score 56 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 08 '19 at 07:49

56

Jakob Nielsen's research has answered this for any application (web apps aren't special in this regard):

0.1 second: Limit for users feeling that they are directly manipulating objects in the UI.
1 second: Limit for users feeling that they are freely navigating the command space without having to unduly wait for the computer.
10 seconds: Limit for users keeping their attention on the task.

So for web apps you should keep your page response times at 500 ms maximum on average near the servers, to have a web app that is a pleasure to use even with a network latency of 200-300 ms.

edited Jan 08 '19 at 07:49

Maggyero

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answered Nov 17 '10 at 23:12

Tormod Hystad

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I definitely do not fit into this box. I think these categories are woefully outdated (1993) for the modern web. If any page takes more than [2-3 seconds](https://royal.pingdom.com/page-load-time-really-affect-bounce-rate/), I'm outta there. Also, if dynamic ads shift content while I'm reading, I get deeply perturbed! – Chiramisu Mar 01 '19 at 19:16

Matthew Murdoch · Answer 2 · 2016-10-06T09:53:36.127

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Acceptable UI response times are based on human psychology and are therefore the same for web applications as they are for traditional desktop applications.

Depending on how the end user perceives the operation that is being performed, an acceptable response time might be 1 second (e.g. for closing a 'dialog window') or 10 seconds (e.g. for displaying the results of a calculation).

The usability guru Jakob Nielsen has written a good article about acceptable web application response times.

Published UI guidelines specify the same acceptable response times, for example:

Java Look and Feel Guidelines

GNOME UI Documentation.

edited Oct 06 '16 at 09:53

answered Oct 08 '08 at 20:48

Matthew Murdoch

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These are good answers. Any luck finding anything for web apps? The only thing I can find is that there IS no standard :( – Alex Argo Oct 08 '08 at 21:16
Yes. Jakob Nielsen has written a fair amount on this subject. – Matthew Murdoch Oct 08 '08 at 21:20
GNOME UI Documentation link has changed to https://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/unstable/feedback-response-times.html.en – Abhishek Asthana Oct 03 '16 at 12:39

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 09 '08 at 08:12

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Yes Nielsen's article has some good info about how psychology is involved. Here you can find more information about why the "perceived performance" matters, and not only the actual response time.

answered Oct 09 '08 at 08:12

kohlerm

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score 0 · Answer 4 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:29

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I posted a related question and got some interesting answers that may help. See

What is considered a good response time for a dynamic, personalized web application?

edited May 23 '17 at 10:29

Community

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answered Oct 08 '08 at 20:47

Michael Bobick

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Oct 08 '08 at 20:49

A while back I was told by a professor that the average user gives up after 10 seconds of waiting, with nothing happening. Seeing something happen will likely increase their tendency to wait. But that was a while back... when the interwebs were slower.

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Oct 08 '08 at 21:15

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There's a nice blog post here that argues that there really is no industry standard.

Maybe there's no good way to do this.

answered Oct 08 '08 at 21:15

Alex Argo

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score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Jan 23 '20 at 21:27

The answers to this question focus on UI behaviour and many of them assume that there is always a hard link between network response time and UI responsiveness.

While that may have been true 11 years ago when the last answer was posted, these days the strategies for implementing Web pages have evolved and best practises mean that many of the XHR calls are independent of making a page immediately valuable to the user.

I suspect that even the human psychology parts of these answers have changed with time - people generally now have higher expectations and lower patience thresholds for Web pages.

score -4 · Answer 8 · answered Oct 08 '08 at 20:58

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∞ is the least acceptable response time.

After that the maximum time that a user expects it to take, which varies a lot depending on your service.

An animated area will greatly increase the user's patience, be it an hourglass, swirl, circle, even a bar that fills up and empties itself over and over. As long as the problem is clearly not that their actions went unheard, they will wait.

answered Oct 08 '08 at 20:58

dlamblin

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Heh; literally 12 year old answer still gets a downvote. There is still no standard. Sure there's some research, but, it's not necessarily going to apply to your application. Note how the research is put in terms of orders of magnitude. I mean 10s; yeah that's a lot. but is there a big difference between 9 and 11? no. – dlamblin Sep 16 '20 at 00:28

Is there some industry standard for unacceptable webapp response time?

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