Monitoring Website Performance Successfully
Most website monitoring services send an e-mail once they detect a web server outage. Maximizing uptime is very important, but it's only part of the picture. It appears that the expectations of Online users are increasing all the time, and today's users is not going to wait lengthy for a page to load. If they don't be given a response quickly they'll move on to the competition, usually in a matter of a few seconds.
A good web site monitoring service can do much more than simply send advice when a calendar.yahoo.com. The most effective services will breakdown the response time of a web request into important categories that will permit the system administrator or web developer to optimize the server or application to supply the best possible overall response time.
Listed below are 5 important components of response time for an HTTP request:
1.DNS Lookup Time: The time it takes to get the authoritative name server for that domain and for that server to resolve the hostname provided and return the appropriate IP address. If the time is just too long the DNS server has to be optimized in order to provide a faster response.
2.Connect Time: The time has come required for the net server to reply to an incoming (TCP) socket connection and order and to respond by creating the connection. If this is slow it usually indicates the operating system is trying to respond to more requests of computer can handle.
3.SSL Handshake: For pages secured by SSL, it is now time required for either side to negotiate the handshake process and hang up the secure connection.
4.Time to First Byte (TTFB): The time has come it takes for the web server to reply with the first byte of content following your request is sent. Slow times here more often than not mean the web application is inefficient. Possible reasons include inadequate server resources, slow database queries and other inefficiencies linked to application development.
5.Time and energy to Last Byte (TTLB): It is now time needed to return all the content, following your request has been processed. If this is taking too much time it usually indicates that the Internet connection is just too slow or possibly overloaded. Increasing bandwidth or acquiring dedicated bandwidth should resolve this problem.
It is extremely hard to diagnose slow HTTP response times without all of this information. With no important response data, administrators are still to guess about where the problem lies. Lots of time and money can be wasted trying to improve different aspects of the web application with the aspiration that something works. It's possible to completely overhaul an internet server and application only to find the whole problem was really slow DNS responses; a problem which exists on a different server altogether.
Use a website monitoring service that does a lot more than provide simple outage alerts. The very best services will break the response time into meaningful parts that will allow the administrator to identify and correct performance problems efficiently.