Please fix the website performance - it's costly

In one of the tech review sessions I overheard a developer saying "my code is running good - the performance is as expected, the pages open in 3-4 seconds". The other reviewers agreed that it is a good performing piece code and should be 'acceptable' to the QA and eventually the end customer. I started asking myself - why is 3-4 seconds page load time considered as "good"? What if all websites today start loading in 3 seconds and then tomorrow in 4 seconds? What will be the impact? Let me break it down:

• Internet has (approx) 3 billion users
• Let's say on an average each user visits 5 web page in a day
• Now let's assume that the web pages have become slower by 1 sec (from 3sec to 4sec)
• This translates to

3 billion users X 5 web pages X 1 sec ~= 475 years per day

• So the total productivity loss is pretty damn huge. Although we measure the page loading time in seconds - it ends up impacting in years.

Even if we calculate the 'loss' of productivity for a 1 sec delay just for Facebook users - that itself is a mind-blowing number. If all the developers of the world did a decent job with their performance testing - we would have a lot less 'wasted time'. Since online users are now suffering from 'page transition anxiety' - anything that makes page load/transition faster will be welcome. 

On a side note: the same day someone asked me a tricky question - "is there a use case or scenario (could be unrelated to internet) where a faster response time will be bad?" Interesting, I thought - since all the business processes are being optimized, performance numbers are improving every day and we want all systems to performs fast - it's really unthinkable to expect a negative impact of a faster response time. After a few minutes of scratching the deep end of my brain I could think of one scenario:

• If I go to a good restaurant and order a well-done steak and the chef serves me one in a few seconds - I think I will be concerned.

What other scenarios can you think of?