I guess along these lines the following question came up. If this was supposed to be an end-to-end user performance idea, why were backbone provider sites being hit instead of sites more typical end users would be using? Say, a major search engine? It smacks me that the article's results were slanted to make a comment on backbones, not user-viewed performance, where the test has been argued to be measuring the latter. DISCLOSURE: Then again, we do a god awful amount of web traffic and like people looking at "real world" performance over any particular path through any particular cloud. -Deepak. On Wed, 9 Jul 1997, Craig A. Huegen wrote:
On Wed, 9 Jul 1997, Jack Rickard wrote:
Before you start with your claims, Jack, that I have something to lose, you should realize that I am an independent consultant, and work for none of the people in the study.
==>what looks LOGICAL to me, not anything I know or have tested. I am rather ==>convinced that moving a single web site to another location, putting it on ==>larger iron, or using different OS will have very minor impact on the ==>numbers.
You may be convinced because of the theory you've developed to match the flawed methodology with which the tests were performed. However, I have some tests that I did to measure the connect delays on sites.
Here's the average for 200 web sites that were given to me when I polled some people for their favorite sites (duplicates excluded):
(because in a lot of cases we're talking milliseconds, percentage is not really fine enough, but this was to satisfy personal curiosity)
SYN -> SYN/ACK time (actual connection) 22% Web browser says "Contacting www.website.com..."
SYN/ACK -> first data (web server work-- 78% getting material, processing material) Web browser says "www.website.com contacted, waiting for response"
Note that this didn't include different types of content. But it *did* truly measure one thing--that the delay caused by web servers is considerably higher than that of "network performance" (or actual connect time).
And, the biggest beef is that you claimed Boardwatch's test was BACKBONE NETWORK performance, not end-to-end user-perception performance. You threw in about 20 extra variables that cloud exactly what you were measureing. Not to mention completely misrepresenting what you actually measured.
/cah