Comment by JustSomeNobody
7 years ago
Ages ago I evaluated some reporting software. We were using Crystal Reports at the time. One thing that CR did better than the others was make pages available as they were generated. This made the software feel faster even though it was slower than one or two of the others[0] at the time.
[0] Can't remember which ones exactly.
For interactive applications, reponsiveness trumps raw throughput. It's what made operating systems like AmigaOS and BeOS so fast: they didn't actually crunch numbers faster, but they always stayed responsive and quickly reacted to user input under any load, that made them feel faster.
Just had a little PTSD flashback moment there at seeing the words "Crystal Reports"
Oh dear. That garbage came with Cold Fusion (before it became ColdFusion), IIRC.
Which is why browsers take so seriously the time to first paint despite the efforts by javascript frameworks to push it back.