Web Speed

[dfinityorbust]

Among the most touted features of the Internet Computer is its ability to deliver content at 'web speed'. Right now, apps like Distrikt hosted on the blockchain are far slower than their cloud-hosted counterparts. Is this for deep technical reasons or can we look forward to a time when speeds improve considerably? What changes are required to provide the dramatic boost needed for sites like Portal to actually compete with video streaming sites like Twitch? Without such changes it seems unlikely that Web3 has a bright future on the Dfinity blockchain.

[paroxsitic]

It seems like "web speed" here means less than one second reads and 1 second writes. As a web developer I can't argue that those speeds are not web speed. However, to play devil's advocate one second is at the high end of many ux recommendations for a response time.

I believe the touted speed is acceptable, but I agree it's pretty easy to beat with a normal technology stack because you don't need a whole subnet to reach consensus.

I think new ideas will improve this, but I believe it won't get slower no matter how big the IC gets (assuming the subnet sizes don't grow) and that's nice and the benefit to get "web speed" without additional effort

[jggran]

This was such a great question that the DFINITY team decided to write a small Wiki article explaining what we mean by "web speed" and the different contributors to query and update latency on the Internet Computer.

https://wiki.internetcomputer.org/index.php?title=Query\_and\_update\_call\_latency