Acceptable server response times

[Imagicor]

I recently signed up for a 3rd party server monitoring service to keep an eye on our servers and notifiy us of any server downtime.

They check http, smtp and dns for each of the servers from 3 different locations.

So far I'm seeing ping times running in the 80-100ms range which is in the area I was expecting.

What has me concerned is that they're showing http responses averaging 800+ ms, smtp averaging 300ms and dns averaging 240ms. All 3 are on separate servers on the same network. Is this normal or is this an indication that our servers(http in particular) are stressed? Does anyone have any idea of what good response times should be for the various ports on a server? Should they be much different than the ping time?

Thanks,

Jim

[bakedjake]

Is this normal or is this an indication that our servers(http in particular) are stressed?

Seems normal. They're measuring the response time necessary to initate a two-way connection, so there would be protocol overhead. Most services don't measure this properly - for example, they forget to deduct the DNS lookup time from the HTTP measurements and SMTP measurements. So keep that in mind. If there is a stateful (packet-inspecting) firewall at either end, this will add a little time too.

But those numbers don't seem unreasonable.

[DaveAtIFG]

http responses averaging 800+ ms, smtp averaging 300ms and dns averaging 240ms

Your third party service is checking responses across the Internet and net traffic varies with the time of day. The numbers you quote are very reasonable during peak traffic periods, but seem excessive for off-peak periods.

This [internettrafficreport.com] may be useful to you.

[Imagicor]

Thanks for the quick replies. I'll keep an eye on the numbers during various times of the day to see how everything works out.