The common industry standard for response times is the “eight-second rule.” This is commonly interpreted as a requirement that NO response take longer than eight seconds. Experience, and common sense, have shown that no rigid rule exists. Some common design practices can mask response times longer than eight seconds. For instance, interleaving text and graphic responses, or sending the first part of a page while generating the remain parts, let many users feel like they are seeing satisfactory response times, even when the application may take much longer to build and download a complete page. In general, our experience shows that users will leave a site when response times average above eight seconds. It also shows that users will tolerate apparently long waits (30 seconds or more) interspersed in a generally snappy application when they believe that some operation is going on in the background (like credit card processing) and they receive some indication that the system is still ali