Umibot picked up some news on his neural net late in the day…

Ends up that UMI placed third out of 500+ websites in latency. Our home page loaded in 7.639ms compared with 1800ms for Amazon.com. That means UMI is 250x faster than Amazon’s servers! Yes, and no. It’s an interesting test, but not especially meaningful as it may be a factor more of colo facility and HTMLness than anything else. Some thoughts from Rich Skrenta, who authored the post:

Making a leap here… This means that people’s well-trained subliminal neural hardware is deciding whether to click Back even before they’ve consciously realized what they’re looking at…cool.

I’d recommend the following performance yardstick for server latency:

50ms = pretty good

250ms = ave/sluggish, but still OK

500ms = your site is slow as molasses

Faster is always better, but if you’re in the 50-100ms range you can feel pretty good about your platform. Over that, and there’s probably some easy wins to be had, which will payoff in user satisfaction and a lower hardware ramp in the co-lo.

So how does the rest of the net stack up?

The following list is the result of running apachebench on 530 Web 2.0 sites pulled from CrunchBase. I also added some of the major sites such as Google, Yahoo, and so forth for comparison.