200 Milliseconds: The Hidden Life of a Single HTTP Request
An interactive visualization follows one HTTP request from a coffee-shop click to order confirmation in 211.4 milliseconds, revealing seven stops, six cross-country trips, and forty machines. It breaks down the journey: touchpad interrupts, browser hit testing, cache misses, TCP/TLS handshakes, and the server side—all while a live clock tracks the elapsed time. The piece highlights how caching and warm sockets make repeat requests dramatically faster, and why POST requests bypass caches entirely.
By the time the confirmation renders, the request and its replies will have crossed North America six times and passed through around forty machines, running a hundred million lines of other people's code.
- jonahrd
Am I crazy if for something like an online purchase, I kind of expect it to take a second or two to process the payment, so I would assume something went wrong if it was 200ms?
- felooboolooomba
> The person who clicked noticed no delay.
Just to be the "actually..." guy: People notice 200ms delay. It's just that in cases it doesn't cause any bad feelings."
- beders
This is magnificent!
Gave me roller-coaster ride across 40 years of gathering knowledge about computers and networks.
I'm very jealous of whoever created that. Well done!