# Assistant response delay compared to Chat

**URL:** <https://community.openai.com/t/assistant-response-delay-compared-to-chat/1085773>\
**Category:** API\
**Created:** [January 9, 2025, 5:10pm UTC](https://community.openai.com/t/assistant-response-delay-compared-to-chat/1085773 "2025-01-09T17:10:52Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![cagri1](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/openai1/user_avatar/community.openai.com/cagri1/32/511661_2.png) [@cagri1](https://community.openai.com/u/cagri1)\
**Post date:** [January 9, 2025, 5:10pm UTC](https://community.openai.com/t/assistant-response-delay-compared-to-chat/1085773/1 "2025-01-09T17:10:52Z")

</div>

For a short (250 word) System Message, an assistant starts reponding in about 4 to 6 secods, while Chat almost responds immediately (gpt-4o-mini)

Is this expected?

I don’t use any specific assistant features, such as code interpreter or file search. To make sure it wasn’t the client, I tried same system and user prompts side by side on the playground, same results. Assistants very consistently wait a few seconds before start streaming.