8-second rule

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Research done in June 1999 by [Zona Research] found that the average Web customer 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 measuring the adequate response time of a webserver through different bandwidth connections. Basically, it specified that if the pages from your server were taking longer than 8 seconds to display, then users were not going to stick around much longer. In order to increase the "stickiness" of a website, faster ways to deliver the content to the user had to be devised. These included stripping away unnecessary HTML code and using fewer images.

It is generally believed that this rule doesn't apply any longer, since a much higher percentage of Internet users now have broadband available, which makes almost every website load up much faster, in some cases in less than a second. However, the rule has remained as a rough unit to measure the performance of a webserver.

References

Software Quality Engineering's Web/eBusiness Testing Version 2.1
[8 Second Rule]

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