Latency: Why You Should Worry and What Up You Can Do About It
Philip Tellis, Yahoo! Inc.
2010 Velocity Conference
June 22-24, 2010
(15 min, 40 sec)

Here are my notes from watching the presentation:

  • Bandwidth is easy – It is not the problem…
  • Bandwidth vs. Latency – How bad is it?
  • More resources on a page, latency more of a problem
  • It’s Still the Latency, Stupid http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html
  • Javascript adds latency

What to Do About Latency?

  • How did CPUs solve latency? Cache, Parallelise, Predict
  • These apply to the web as well…
  • Pre-fetch content is a way to predict

How to measure?

  • Announcing Boomerang http://github.com/yahoo/boomerang
  • Measures page load time from the unload of the last page to this page is loaded
  • Measures bandwidth
  • Measures latency
  • Include a script on the page, include a beacon on your server to send the data…
  • BSD license