Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Arvind Jain, a Google
engineer, pointed out the loading speed of individual elements of a
website on a test application used to check efficiency, at Google
offices in Mountain View, Calif.
No, that’s too long.
Remember when you were willing to wait a few seconds for a computer to
respond to a click on a Web site or a tap on a keyboard? These days,
even 400 milliseconds — literally the blink of an eye — is too long, as
Google engineers have discovered. That barely perceptible delay causes
people to search less.
“Subconsciously, you don’t like to wait,” said Arvind Jain, a Google
engineer who is the company’s resident speed maestro. “Every millisecond
matters.”
Google and other tech companies are on a new quest for speed,
challenging the likes of Mr. Jain to make fast go faster. The reason is
that data-hungry smartphones and tablets are creating frustrating
digital traffic jams, as people download maps, video clips of sports
highlights, news updates or recommendations for nearby restaurants. The
competition to be the quickest is fierce.
People will visit a Web site less often if it is slower than a close
competitor by more than 250 milliseconds (a millisecond is a thousandth
of a second).
“Two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to
the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web,” said Harry
Shum, a computer scientist and speed specialist at Microsoft.
The performance of Web sites varies, and so do user expectations. A
person will be more patient waiting for a video clip to load than for a
search result. And Web sites constantly face trade-offs between visual
richness and snappy response times. As entertainment and news sites,
like The New York Times Web site, offer more video clips and interactive
graphics, that can slow things down.
But speed matters in every context, research shows. Four out of five
online users will click away if a video stalls while loading.
On a mobile phone, a Web page takes a leisurely nine seconds to load,
according to Google, which tracks a huge range of sites from the homes
of large companies to the legions of one-person bloggers. Download times
on personal computers average about six seconds worldwide, and about
3.5 seconds on average in the United States. The major search engines,
Google and Microsoft’s Bing, are the speed demons of the Web, analysts
say, typically delivering results in less than a second.
The hunger for speed on smartphones is a new business opportunity for
companies like Akamai Technologies, which specializes in helping Web
sites deliver services quicker. Later this month, Akamai plans to
introduce mobile accelerator software to help speed up the loading of a
Web site or app.
The government too recognizes the importance of speed in mobile
computing. In February, Congress opened the door to an increase in
network capacity for mobile devices, proposing legislation that permits
the auction of public airwaves now used for television broadcasts to
wireless Internet suppliers.
Overcoming speed bumps is part of the history of the Internet. In the
1990s, as the World Wide Web became popular, and crowded, it was called
the World Wide Wait. Invention and investment answered the call.
Laying a lot of fiber optic cable for high-speed transmission was the
first solution. But beyond bandwidth, the Web got faster because of
innovations in software algorithms for routing traffic, and in
distributing computer servers around the world, nearer to users, as a
way to increase speed.
Akamai, which grew out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s
Laboratory for Computer Science, built its sizable business doing just
that. Most major Web sites use Akamai’s technology today.
The need for speed itself seems to be accelerating. In the early 1960s,
the two professors at Dartmouth College who invented the BASIC
programming language, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, set up a network in
which many students could tap into a single, large computer from
keyboard terminals.
In 2009, a study by Forrester Research found that online shoppers
expected pages to load in two seconds or fewer — and at three seconds, a
large share abandon the site. Only three years earlier a similar
Forrester study found the average expectations for page load times were
four seconds or fewer.
The two-second rule is still often cited as a standard for Web commerce
sites. Yet experts in human-computer interaction say that rule is
outdated. “The old two-second guideline has long been surpassed on the
racetrack of Web expectations,” said Eric Horvitz, a scientist at
Microsoft’s research labs.
Google, which harvests more Internet ad revenue than any other company,
stands to benefit more than most if the Internet speeds up. Mr. Jain,
who worked at Microsoft and Akamai before joining Google in 2003, is an
evangelist for speed both inside and outside the company. He leads a
“Make the Web Faster” program, begun in 2009. He also holds senior
positions in industry standards groups.
Speed, Mr. Jain said, is a critical element in all of Google’s products.
There is even a companywide speed budget; new offerings and product
tweaks must not slow down Google services. But there have been lapses.
In 2007, for example, after the company added popular new offerings like
Gmail, things slowed down enough that Google’s leaders issued a “Code
Yellow” and handed out plastic stopwatches to its engineers to emphasize
that speed matters.
Still, not everyone is in line with today’s race to be faster. Mr.
Kurtz, the Dartmouth computer scientist who is the co-inventor of BASIC,
is now 84, and marvels at how things have changed.
