How fast is your server - performance measurements?

[scorpion]

My question is actually probably very difficult to answer. Suppose you have two servers, one on the West Coast and one on the East Coast - how can you objectively verify that your servers are reasonably fast for surfers?

A related question is: Is there a service or consulting company that can verify that your server is optimized properly for serving your site?

[keyplyr]

I Googled "site speed" , "server speed" , "site speed test" and "server speed test" and got lots of resources.

[Ankheg]

I use the various VisualRoute servers to check the latency of my sites from various parts of the world at various times of the day. It's cheap, and it's worked well enough for me.

As far as optimisation for webserving, there are a lot of sites out there that deal with fine-tuning, Apache in particular. Having tried thttpd, I'm hooked on it, but it doesn't do fancy stuff like PHP.

SQL may be fun, but it can slow a site down... One of my customers' site is a busy forum, and they crash SQL every other week, almost regular as clockwork. Gettin' annoying. :)

[scorpion]

This is interesting!

I've always wondered how to translate from numbers to subjective experience, this is truly difficult to do - to say that a latency of x ms translates into an acceptable experience or not.

I suppose it also depends on the user's internet connection and distance from the server. What would be interesting is if there was a statistical method to determine that your site traffic was capped relative to another benchmark system and to suggest that this difference was a function of users being frustrated with the slowness of the connection.

[Ankheg]

I'm less concerned with absolute latency than consistency. If users from the UK are consistently experiencing 300-400ms latency, it'll be fine, they'll learn to adapt, and my sites are all small and fast-loading regardless. It's when the latency is 172ms one day, 690ms the next, and 445ms the third day that I get concerned. I also like to check where the latency appears; a lot of times it's a certain router somewhere that's causing problems.

Checking the connection speed, and checking the server itself (as with "top"), are about the easiest things you can do...

[Imaster]

Aakheg,

I use the various VisualRoute servers to check the latency of my sites from various parts of the world at various times of the day. It's cheap, and it's worked well enough for me.

Any specific resource to suggest... And any free tool that helps do it.

[dcheney]

I noticed that Alexa added a web site speed measurement recently - no idea on its accuracy.

[Ankheg]

VisualRoute is at the obvious place; search in Google. :) They have links to web-based implementations of the software in various places around the world. You just type in your URL and click "go", and it traceroute's your server from, for example, London, showing the latency (average/min/max) and packet loss at each step, plus where the IP's along the way are located (more or less accurate, with exceptions).

I don't check Alexa often, but I notice that none of my sites (all in the one-million plus ranking, alas) have speeds listed...