8-second Rule
A June 2001 Zona Research report entitled "The Need for Speed II" found that the average web user will wait about eight seconds for a page to download, but that current average download time across backbone connection on most web sites is almost ten seconds.
The 8-second rule is an old (by Internet standards) way of determining the adequate response time of a webserver through different bandwidth connections. It specified that if the load-time of a web page exceeds eight seconds, users are unlikely to wait, or "stick around", for its completion. In order to increase the "stickiness" of a website, faster ways to deliver the content to the user needed to be devised. These included stripping away unnecessary HTML code and using fewer images.
It is generally believed that this rule no longer applies, since a much higher percentage of Internet users now have broadband available, making almost every website load up much faster, in some cases in less than a second. However, the rule might not be totally obsolete, as few webpages limit themselves to purely HTML and images nowadays and scripts, Flash and other interactive content take a long time to load even with the best of connections. Anyhow, the rule has remained as a rough unit to measure the performance of a webserver.
Read more about this topic: Network Performance
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