I cannot remember exactly, but in the discussions about page load times translating into revenue, 100ms was the number being tossed around, IIRC.

I certainly notice any time I boot something up that requires the JVM, I refuse to use the CLR, so I can't tell you much about my own experience with that.

Once it gets going though it screams. Not sure I want to trade the miniscule difference in startup time for that.

As for page load times, this is silly. There is no startup time on a page at all. Possibly the first hit but there are warm start options for that in CLR at least which make this a complete non issue.

To give you an idea, 98% of our page hits are under 80ms processing time and we have big, heavy pages (we're old school asp.net mostly).

I'm not talking about page load times. A server side app is a great use-case for something that has slow startup. I was just using that as a citation for perceptions on speed and how it can negatively affect experience.

I'm talking about command-line applications, like the one in the article and in your first post. Then you get the startup every single time you run the command.

For stuff like tab completion and for launching small command-line apps (think "grep", "sed", etc), absolutely. A penalty of hundreds of milliseconds for the _launcher_ alone can double (or more) the total execution time.

I use zeroinstall a lot (I'm a contributor), and I turned off tab completion because the lag (of the python implementation) made me wonder if my terminal had locked up, which was far more distracting than trying to remember the available arguments. I have re-enabled it in the ocaml port, because now it's effectively instant.