Making the right call : How the internet works

So, going back to our example of visiting the profile page of your aunt.

If your database has thousands of users, it can take a long time for your hosting provider to find your aunt’s username in the database and find the right place where it states that she has the picture “apple_pie_thanksgiving_Imissyou.jpg” set as her profile picture. When we say “long time”, we’re talking about milliseconds here.

But beware that many requests are being made at once. So it all adds up. In the end, our aunt’s profile may take 5 seconds to load, and that’s an eternity in internet time.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves here, but when we talk about website optimization, we are taking into account these, and many other, aspects of how the internet works. And you should too!

Let’s just review the concepts here and how they interact with each other.