what is considered average request processing time?

Question

What is normal time range for request processing?

Answer 1

Anything between 50ms to 500ms would be good.

This of course is only the server side. Have a look at Yahoo's Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site and Firebug YSlow on learning and measuring the response times on the client side as well.

Answer 2

Anything slower than 8 seconds is generally considered too long. 1-2 seconds is average for most heavy websites.

Answer 3

In my limited experience, the user will generally notice an interactive site as being slow if responses are routinely taking over one second. A few seconds or more can be maddening. By "interactive", I mean something where the user is going to be generating a lot of pages, like a forum.

Here's an interesting article / book snippet about response times: http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html