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0 pointsveidr3y ago0 comments

Yeah you’re not wrong. But I wouldn’t consider that 100ms, or even 500ms, “expensive”.

In 1999 I would have been jealous of your internet connection — I still had a 256kbps ISDN line, and there were fast forums even then (but mostly not). I think it mainly depended on whether the sites rendered HTML on the fly (with like maybe Perl? to render database content) or... just served static HTML.

Page reloads only got expensive when we decided that they would do a bunch of other shit besides that.

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com2kid3y ago

> Yeah you’re not wrong. But I wouldn’t consider that 100ms, or even 500ms, “expensive”.

100ms is noticeable, 500ms is bad.

The old dial up BBSs may have been slow enough that you could watch character appear, but they were responsive! Those characters started printing right after your keypress happened. Of course it helped that it was likely a local phone call.

I imagine HN ever had a 500ms response rate, the engineers behind it would consider it a failure!

(Even reddit is under 500ms for many operations, and it is super heavyweight)

> I think it mainly depended on whether the sites rendered HTML on the fly (with like maybe Perl? to render database content) or... just served static HTML.

Yeah Perl didn't help the 90s web at all. It made stuff possible, but wow, the performance was bad.

Then again web server software design back then was also a long ways away from what we know to do now.

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