If you're a company like Facebook or Google, you're looking to eke growth out of every corner of the Earth, including those with really slow Internet.
So after you've conquered the 1st and 2nd world countries, you start optimizing for additional tiers. (And optionally launch balloons that shower Internet upon untapped markets)
However, if you're not one of those two behemoths, then your target audience is probably located within ~3,500 miles of you/your servers (which would translate roughly into a RTT latency figure of ~100 milliseconds, and add 40ms for those folks on low-grade ADSL or cellular connections).
Your barebones site is competing with other fully-featured sites that are taking advantage of the high bandwidth delay product that's available to them.
Unless, competing for eyeballs is not one of your goals.
But regardless, optimizing for reach beyond that mileage range by slicing bits here and there, rather than bolting on a CDN, is probably a premature optimization.
To throw out a new presumption, I'd say that if you measured user's rage, they're more angry with packet loss than with consistent latency.
One is predictable and can be planned for ("open 5 tabs, go do some chores, come back in 15 minutes when they're loaded").
The other is absolutely infuriating ("open 1 tab, get teased by some amount of partially loaded objects, spend the next 5 minutes refreshing due to socket timeouts, cross fingers that not too many refreshes evicts items out of the local cache, give up")
If you're a company like Facebook or Google, you're looking to eke growth out of every corner of the Earth, including those with really slow Internet.
So after you've conquered the 1st and 2nd world countries, you start optimizing for additional tiers. (And optionally launch balloons that shower Internet upon untapped markets)
However, if you're not one of those two behemoths, then your target audience is probably located within ~3,500 miles of you/your servers (which would translate roughly into a RTT latency figure of ~100 milliseconds, and add 40ms for those folks on low-grade ADSL or cellular connections).
Your barebones site is competing with other fully-featured sites that are taking advantage of the high bandwidth delay product that's available to them.
Unless, competing for eyeballs is not one of your goals.
But regardless, optimizing for reach beyond that mileage range by slicing bits here and there, rather than bolting on a CDN, is probably a premature optimization.
To throw out a new presumption, I'd say that if you measured user's rage, they're more angry with packet loss than with consistent latency.
One is predictable and can be planned for ("open 5 tabs, go do some chores, come back in 15 minutes when they're loaded").
The other is absolutely infuriating ("open 1 tab, get teased by some amount of partially loaded objects, spend the next 5 minutes refreshing due to socket timeouts, cross fingers that not too many refreshes evicts items out of the local cache, give up")