We've always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we're performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There's plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays, the less people will use it.[Google found that] the page with 10 results took 0.4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took 0.9 seconds. Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.In A/B tests, [Amazon] tried delaying the page in increments of 100 mill...