What response time guarentees do you give?

Need something reasonable.

[Shane]

I need your collective expertise. We are contracting a company to develop an application for us. We want to put something into the contract regarding the response time to users over the internet. However, it seems unfair to cover the portion of the internet as the company has no control over this.

The other point is the size of the box we run it on is really our choice. But we have to have some reasonable assurances that this application will not take 10 seconds for each response.

What sort of measures do you suggest?

Thanks in advance,
Shane

[txbakers]

Good question.

As a web developer and server hoster I might take offense to that question, considering some of the target audience might still be using 33K modems.

If the webserver is on a 128K cable upload, the response time to a user on a T1 will still be slow.

there are many factors in response time.

In your contract you can determine parameters such as, the server must have an upload of rate of 1000KBS or greater and must load within 3 seconds on a machine connected at T1 or greater.

That's something I think I could live with.

However, those benchmarks might not always be reached since the internet speed itself fluctuates.

[BwanaZulia]

Most things I have seen say "reasonable" response time, which is of course, not very helpful.

But, if you are controlling the box and cannot control the internet (I tried), you might want to focus on other issues.

- Size of webpage (JS + CSS + HTML)
- Response time on the server (to take out the internet)
- Handling of requests per second (50-100 requests per second).

BZ

[Shane]

Thanks for the advice. That is in the end what we have done, taken the internet out of the equation.

Thanks again,
Shane