Brad Knowles wrote:
I just read the intro to a Slashdot article at http://slashdot.org/articles/06/07/06/1654242.shtml, which quoted the following section:
| Dollar for dollar, network-based computers are faster.
This is incorrect, based on my experience of working in a few data centers.
While it is possible to buy expensive hardware today that has more performance than the average consumer machine, hardware is getting better faster than purchasing decisions.
Because the consumer market is both larger and growing faster than the server market, and the machines less reliable, the average server is older than the average client machine, and thus have less resources than the average client.
Even if you disagree with this point, there's one server for many clients; the amount of resources available to devote to the task of an individual user's web experience is almost always greater on their end of the pipe.
What it boils down to is that people perceive change at around 150msec; very few net users get anywhere near this latency, and so for most, the round-trip delay represents a substantial impediment to the responsiveness of the interface.
~ethan fremen