|
Posted by Jerry Stuckle on April 29, 2008, 12:58 pm
Please log in for more thread options ship wrote:
> Website load speed - how bad is it for you? / How best to measure it?
>
>
> Hi Guys
>
> Although my client's website appears to be blisteringly fast about
> 80-90% of the time, it seems to be dog slow 10-20% of the time. i.e.
> It seems to change from second to second. But from here at least, it
> can take up to 25+ seconds to load a page. (Although it could just be
> bandwidth problems from here in the office...)
>
> 1.
> If interested the URL is http://www.auctionair.co.uk
> Is it fast for you?
>
>
> 2.
> Our hosting company uses "IP Patrol" which clearly isnt telling the
> whole story
> It claims an average of about 0.7, occassionally 1.4 seconds "elapsed
> time" and a data transfer rate of about 3000 K bit/second.
>
> Are there any (freebie) utilities out there that we could try that
> would give a more accurate picture?
>
> Any thoughts?
>
>
> Ship
> Shiperton Henethe
>
>
>
Loads pretty quickly here in Washington, DC, also, (on cable). But it
may be in it's "good" phase now, :-)
There are generally a couple of reasons for a slowdown like this -
either the server is under heavy load (i.e. a shared server with other
sites occasionally overloading the CPU) or a problem with the bandwidth
between the server and your location.
Since this is a Windows server, if you have remote desktop access, you
can watch the task manager to see if you're running short of resources,
i.e. virtual memory or cpu is getting too high. Unfortunately, I don't
know of any scripts which do it from the command line like you have in
Linux, but there might be something available there.
Bandwidth issues are normally on the client end - because server farms
generally have multiple very high speed links to the internet. Your isp
may have this also, but generally it's fewer links and more users per
link (because clients typically don't use as much bandwidth on the
average as servers do). But it could be either end, or somewhere in the
middle. One way to check this is to get others in widely separated
locations (or at least not on the same ISP) to try the server during the
slowdown.
It could also be you're losing one or more packets. In a case like
this, TCP/IP has to wait for a timeout value and send a retry to the
server. This will slow down everything (only 7 packets can be
outstanding at one time on a connection). It's pretty normal for that
to happen occasionally, but shouldn't happen too regularly. If it does,
it indicates a possible problem with one of the servers or a link
between servers. But I would only expect this to happen once, then
return to normal. If it happens repeatedly over several minutes, then I
would doubt this. You'd have to run a tcp trace during the slowdown to
see if there are any retry packets going out. But you also need to be
able to read a tcp trace.
I hope this gives you some ideas.
--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstucklex@attglobal.net
==================
| 
XML Sitemap