Is there some industry standard for unacceptable webapp response time?

Question

There's a cots(commercial off-the-shelf) application that I work on customizing, where a couple of pages take an extremely long time to load for certain distributions of data. (I'm talking approximately 3 minutes for a page to load in this instance... and the time is growing exponentially).

Clearly this is unacceptable but are there studies out there where I can point what acceptable response time is?

I'd like some good studies possibly that discuss response time.

Answer 1

I posted a related question and got some interesting answers that may help. See

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/164175/what-is-considered-a-good-response-time-for-a-dynamic-personalized-web-applicat

Answer 2

See here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/164175/what-is-considered-a-good-response-time-for-a-dynamic-personalized-web-applicat

Answer 3

Acceptable UI response times are based on human psychology and are therefore the same for web applications as they are for traditional desktop applications.

Depending on how the end user perceives the operation that is being performed, an acceptable response time might be 1 second (e.g. for closing a 'dialog window') or 10 seconds (e.g. for displaying the results of a calculation).

The usability guru Jakob Nielsen has written a good article about acceptable web application response times.

Published UI guidelines specify the same acceptable response times, for example:

Java Look and Feel Guidelines

GNOME UI Documentation.

Answer 4

A while back I was told by a professor that the average user gives up after 10 seconds of waiting, with nothing happening. Seeing something happen will likely increase their tendency to wait. But that was a while back... when the interwebs were slower.

Answer 5

There's a nice blog post here that argues that there really is no industry standard.

Maybe there's no good way to do this.

Answer 6

Yes Nielsen's article has some good info about how psychology is involved. Here you can find more information about why the "perceived performance" matters, and not only the actual response time.