Re: Keynote/Boardwatch Internet Backbone Index A better test!!!
Not an entirely whacky concept actually. The way hot potato routing works, this could actually be a "purer" test I suspect of the network internally and a purer test of connectivity of any network to all others cum Internet. At least in the other direction, complementing what we are probably measuring. Unfortunately, it would require the cooperation of the backbones themselves, and a number of them would not find it in their interest, consider it proprietary, etc. etc. ad nauseum. The problem is, that many of these companies benefit in the marketplace from this game of liars poker, and don't WANT ****ANY**** testing or results. Keynote does a "Top 40" study of 40 popular web sites and I believe they make the results available on their web site. It is interesting to observe performance variations of the network as a whole over time. Other than that, we don't have much interest in it. It is indicative of no specific network, but of the Internet in general. Jack Rickard =================================================================== Jack Rickard Boardwatch Magazine Editor/Publisher 8500 West Bowles Ave., Ste. 210 jack.rickard@boardwatch.com Littleton, CO 80123 www.boardwatch.com Voice: (303)973-6038 =================================================================== ----------
From: Peter Cole <Peter.Cole@telescan.com> To: nanog@merit.edu Cc: marketing@keynote.com Subject: RE: Keynote/Boardwatch Internet Backbone Index A better test!!! Date: Friday, June 27, 1997 11:57 AM
I would like to see the test run again with the following change.
From each provider test the response time of the other 28 sites and not the providers own web server. Then average the response times for these other 28 web servers and report that average response time from that provider. The providers with good connectivity to the rest of the net should have lower average response time.
P.S. One might also be interested in the top one hundred web sites average response time.
Peter Cole of Telescan, Inc. (281)588-9155 Better computing through lack of sleep.
---------- From: Golan Ben-Oni[SMTP:bnite@tremere.ios.com] Sent: Thursday, June 26, 1997 3:53 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Keynote/Boardwatch Internet Backbone Index
For shits and grins:
http://www.keynote.com/measures/backbones/backbones.html
-Golan
On Fri, 27 Jun 1997, Jack Rickard wrote: ==>Not an entirely whacky concept actually. The way hot potato routing works, ==>this could actually be a "purer" test I suspect of the network internally ==>and a purer test of connectivity of any network to all others cum Internet. The article says that you're measuring backbone provider performance, yet you're including: * carrier's web server location * carrier's web server performance ==>Keynote does a "Top 40" study of 40 popular web sites and I believe they ==>make the results available on their web site. It is interesting to observe ==>performance variations of the network as a whole over time. Other than ==>that, we don't have much interest in it. It is indicative of no specific ==>network, but of the Internet in general. /cah
for an exmple of somewhat more complete and better designed benchmarks of this type: http://www.inversenet.com/about/backgrounder.html#2 note that they understand the numerous factors that contribute to overall performance. only a marketing droid could think downloading 50k worth of web pages is somehow an indicator of overall performance. b3n
for an exmple of somewhat more complete and better designed benchmarks of this type:
We make web measurements from over 800 points (POPs) on the Internet for roughly 20 ISP's using a standard basket of 10 popular web pages (porn pages excluded given there is the believe it will drive down the productivity of our operation staff :) We control the test by having every ISP runs through the same set of pages at roughly the same time. (By the way, to closely emulate consumer end user's experience, we specifically use a [painful] test harness to drive Netscape 3.0 on Windows95 over boring 33.6 modem line ... would have love to use a UNIX script with our own custom browser over our direct link into the net instead ... but then it is not what consumer users are doing ... oh well). Even with the extensive matrix of measurements, the only claim we dare to make is that it approximate a end user experience index a la Dow Jones's basket of companies. (By the way, with few interesting exceptions, mostly limited by the size of the final pipe - the modem link). We think there are way too much variables involved to allow us to defintively partition out the components such as the page structure (how many other embedded objects we have to retrieve, compressibility by modem of those objects etc.), the Web server load at the time the measurement was made, the load of the web server's LAN, the load and size of that LAN's pipe into the server's ISP, that ISP's network performance, its peering performance with the end user's ISP (and transit links if any), the user's ISP's network performance .... etc. etc. etc. Even with extensive analysis, it will be difficult for us to derive the backbone performance component from our end to end measurement. If it is the underlying network performance one wants I think a different measurment infrastructure such as those being developed by Paxon/Mathis/Jamshid (NIMI), Almes/Barber (Surveryor), and Graig Labovitz (Merit) ... using tools such as Jacobson's Pathchar will be much more appropriate. Regards, John Leong
On Jun 27, Jack Rickard <jack.rickard@boardwatch.com> wrote:
Keynote does a "Top 40" study of 40 popular web sites and I believe they make the results available on their web site. It is interesting to observe performance variations of the network as a whole over time. Other than that, we don't have much interest in it. It is indicative of no specific network, but of the Internet in general.
Where does my network end and the Internet in general begin? Where does your testing equipment end and the Internet in general begin? Along those lines, I'm happy to announce that I'm prepared to offer one megabyte of FREE web space to any backbone. It will be hosted on www.cybernothing.org, a FreeBSD machine running Apache, currently co-located with Erol's and soon to move to the Priori office. Every backbone whose web page is hosted on my server is almost guranteed to have equal network performance in the eyes of Keynote, Boardwatch, and anybody nieve enough to believe them. I'll even put the same 10k file in each directory. *grin* *********************************************************************** J.D. Falk voice: +1-415-482-2840 Supervisor, Network Operations fax: +1-415-482-2844 PRIORI NETWORKS, INC. http://www.priori.net "The People You Know. The People You Trust." ***********************************************************************
participants (5)
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Ben Black -
Craig A. Huegen -
J.D. Falk -
Jack Rickard -
leongļ¼ inversenet.com