How Fast Should Your Server Response Times Be?

How fast do your server responses need to be? What's a good server response time?In order to answer this question for any given application, we need to back in to our required server response time by first looking at the high-level overview of the "transaction" that's taking place.It's important to realize that (almost) all latency requirements come from human beings. Your customers click or otherwise trigger an input which causes a page to load or navigate. That leads to a server response, which then leads to some "browser frontend stuff": loading JS, CSS, executing JS.So, any web application interaction has several steps, of which your server response time is only a small part. It's important to realize that your user has no idea that any of this is occurring. Your user only understands the beginning (the input that triggers the interaction) and the end (the end state they wanted to get to, say, the page is loaded or the form is submitted and response recorded). Everything in between in a black box. Your customers don't care if an an interaction spends most of its time executing JavaScript or waiting on the server, they care that the interaction is fast.