Skip to content

Comment on Latency Sneaks Up on Youparent

Comments

at least in addition to median

There was an interesting article here not long ago that made the point that median is basically useless. If you load 5 resources on a page load, the odds of all of them being faster than the median (so it represents the user experience) is about 3%. You need a very high rank to get any useful information, probably with a number of 9s.

Median for a particular action/page might be more useful.

No doubt about that (even then, you will probably want the 90 or 99 percentile, depending on how many interactions you expect a person to have).

Th real median is just very hard to measure, and an easier 99.99 (with more 9's as needed) rank is almost as good.

Can you say more about why you say the "real median" is hard to measure? It doesn't seem hard to measure to me, or any harder than a 99.99 percentile. Why is 50th percentile harder to measure than 99.99th?

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.