Usually feels like
Seconds
It finishes while you are still looking at the screen.
It stays in seconds because a market page of this shape is small plain text, and text arrives quickly once the path exists.
The wait, in plain words
Something has happened. The tab stopped being idle and started being busy, and still there is white. This is the shortest wait on the site with a cause you can name, and it is also the easiest one to mistake for a dead page.
The page is coming in pieces. Your browser holds the top of the markup before it holds the bottom, and it draws what it can as it can. On an ordinary connection that process is invisible because it finishes inside a blink. Here the pieces travel a path with several relays in it, and the drawing is slow enough to watch.
The useful habit is to read white as absence of information rather than as bad news. Almost nothing on this network announces itself while it is still working.
Underneath, while nothing moves
Arrival cost here is dominated by round trips, not by bandwidth. Every part of the page the browser has to ask for separately is another journey along the whole path and back. A page built out of many small parts pays that cost many times over.
This is why markets of this shape tend to look plain. It is not taste. A page with a stylesheet, a font file, a script bundle and a set of images is a page that will feel broken here, because each of those is a separate request riding the same long path. Strip it back to markup with the styling inlined and the whole thing arrives in more or less one go.
The one thing on a sign in screen that genuinely cannot be inlined is the challenge image, which is generated per visit and shipped on its own. It has its own card at the captcha picture appearing, and its own way of going wrong.
What the browser gives you during this stretch is almost nothing: a tab that looks busy and a white area. What it withholds is any sense of how much has arrived. There is no honest progress indicator here, and one that appears is guessing.
Behaving, and not behaving
The distinction that matters is between a page still arriving and a page that has stopped arriving. They look the same until they stop looking the same.
A page that is still coming
White, then a bare unstyled heading, then the rest of it settling into place. Text before layout is normal on this network and is evidence of progress rather than of damage.
The tab keeps showing activity throughout. Something is moving even while the visible area is not.
A page that stopped halfway
Part of the page is drawn and then nothing changes for far longer than it took the first part to appear. The header is there, the body is not.
That is a different wait with its own card. See a page that half arrived.
Text arriving ahead of styling is worth being relaxed about. It looks alarming, because an unstyled page looks like a broken one, but it is the network showing its work.
The case to take seriously is the frozen partial page, because it means one leg of the path has stopped carrying and the browser has not yet decided to give up on it.
Safe to do meanwhile
This stretch is short enough that most interventions cost more than they save. Reloading in particular throws away everything that has already arrived.
- Let the text arrive unstyledStyling that lands after the words is normal here and needs nothing from you.
- Scroll down rather than reloadThe lower part of a page often exists before the browser has finished settling the top of it.
- Read what has already arrivedThe first thing to appear is usually the part that tells you which screen you are on.
- See what the band coversEvery wait that ends while you are still looking at the screen.
- Work out which wait you are inIf the blank stretch came before any activity at all, that was the other wait, not this one.
What makes it longer
Nothing about this stretch is under the market alone. Both ends and everything between them contribute to it.
- A page carrying images, fonts or scripts, each of which is a fresh journey along the same long path.
- A listing page with many thumbnails, which is the heaviest sort of page a market of this shape publishes.
- A slow relay in the middle of the path, which affects arrival even though the arrangement itself already succeeded.
- A market under load, which delays the making of the page before any of it is sent.
- A query that has to be computed before the first byte can leave. See a search coming back.
- Reloading, which discards the part that arrived and starts arrival again from nothing.
What this card is not. This is not about the market being slow in general, it is about one page on one path in one moment.