> What is reasonable? I don't care about hardware limitations, those can be > dealt with according to the situation, but if someone you have payed a > buttload of money brings you back a report that takes 3 to 18 hours to run > (and its a daily report) is that reasonable? I personally don't think so > and have said so to the powers that be and have been given the task to > quantitatively define "reasonable" and I'm asking for input from ya'll. IMHO, we might consider an ergonomic rule that any program which doesn's show any signs of life for more than three seconds is badly designed. If it can't complete action within the three seconds, it should give out some progress indicator, message or at least a warning ("this behavior is by design" :). More often than not, users get annoyed when they get into fourth second and nothing happens; they probably go clicking around or press a few enters more... and you get what you get. The rest of discussion fits with my experience: data entry objects should respond within a second; daily reports within (half) a minute. Monthly reports... depending on the hugeness of data, should finish within working hours. Monthly reports should be designed with more respect to clarity, self-explanatory layout and such matters, and performance is secondary.