How Streaming SSE Cuts AI Agent Response Wait Time from 10 Seconds to 2
A Senior Software Engineer at BS23 in Dhaka identified a critical UX problem in a Spring Boot AI agent where users faced a silent nine-second wait before receiving any response. The issue arose because multi-tool queries — such as combining an order lookup with a return policy check — required the model to complete all processing before returning a single string to the browser. The fix involved switching from a blocking .call() method to a streaming Flux via Spring AI's .stream().content(), which pushes tokens to the browser as the model generates them. Implemented using Spring MVC's SseEmitter for server-sent events, the change reduced time-to-first-token from roughly ten seconds down to two to five seconds. Total processing time remained unchanged, but the perceived responsiveness improved significantly, eliminating the appearance of a frozen or broken interface.
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