Performance Web Sites

New functionality: Site Performance Index graph (2007-08-17)

A new graph type has been added to the monitoring graphs: Site Performance Index.

The new graph is available for all WatchMouse users as of now, and can be found on the graphs page. Select "Site Performance Index" from the first drop-down menu (Display).

This graph shows the WatchMouse Site Performance Index (SPI) for the selected rule(s).
Note: Only rules of the type http and https are included in this graph.

The SPI graph enables you to compare the performance of your web servers. In order to make a fair comparison, the time-out for all rules should be the same.

The WatchMouse Site Performance Index (SPI) contains information on both the availability (or uptime) and the speed of a website. That makes the SPI an accurate representation of the average "waiting time" for a visitor: the higher the SPI, the longer visitors have to wait, on average, for the site to load. A low SPI is good, i.e. the shortest bar in this graph represents the site with the fastest response time and shortest waiting time.

The SPI values in the graph indicate only a relative SPI of your own web sites. If you want to compare your sites to those of your competitors use the WatchMouse SPI performance benchmarking.

New Monitoring Stations in USA, Switzerland, India, South Africa (2008-07-17)

The WatchMouse performance monitoring network expands with another four stations, this time in:

• Chicago, USA
• Zurich, Switzerland
• Mumbai, India
• Johannesburg, South Africa

The total number of checkpoints is now 30, and follows customer demand in these countries, as well as demands from companies operating sites that cater to a worldwide audience.

The new checkpoints will appear automatically in the customer dashboard logs when monitoring is performed from random locations. Customers can select the new stations as the primary checkpoint in the monitoring settings.

The current status of the WatchMouse web site monitoring network can be found on the 'About' tab of the WatchMouse site.

New Monitoring Stations in Belgium, Ireland, Norway and Mexico (2009-04-26)

The WatchMouse performance monitoring network expands with another four stations, this time in:

• Antwerp, Belgium
• Dublin, Ireland
• Oslo, Norway
• Guadalajara, Mexico

The total number of monitoring stations is now 39, and follows customer demand in these countries, as well as demands from companies operating sites that cater to a worldwide audience.

The new monitoring stations will appear automatically in the customer dashboard logs when monitoring is performed from random locations. Customers can select the new locations as the primary monitoring station in the monitoring settings.

The current status of the WatchMouse web site monitoring network can be found in the 'About' tab on the WatchMouse site.

Social networking sites slow and inaccessible (2008-01-10)

WatchMouse research shows Facebook performance poorest of all

The Netherlands, January 10, 2008 – Popular social networking sites fail to deliver to their users, according to WatchMouse. Research from the leading website monitoring company has shown that web 2.0 sites often are slow to open or fail to load properly. WatchMouse monitored the time it took the social networking sites, listed on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites), to load. The results showed that the worst for availability is the immensely popular Facebook.

Other well known culprits include Twitter, last.fm, Windows Live Spaces, Friendster and del.icio.us. Of the 104 sites monitored, 51 show a Site Performance Index (SPI) of 1000 or more, making them very slow in load time. A remarkable outcome, seeing as most sites heavily use Ajax, which should lead to quicker load times since the dynamics of the site do not load immediately. Using Ajax should help websites increase interactivity, speed, functionality and usability by exchanging small amounts of data with the server so the entire webpage does not need loading fully every time someone performs an action on a page.

Of the monitored social networking sites, Faceparty performed the best - with an SPI of 303 - meaning users can access the site most frequently and in the fastest time. Looking at the results, most sites still have a lot to work on if they want their users to keep returning to their site. Research has shown that most web users are very impatient and will wait no longer than four seconds for a webpage to load.

“It is interesting to see that popular networking sites turn out to have very bad performance,” said Mark Pors, CTO at Watchmouse. “It is surprising they still have such a big fan base when they serve their users so badly. Using Ajax technology, they should be able to work more effectively. For now the sites will need to do a lot of work to remain popular and improve their performance.”

A complete overview of the monitoring results of the WatchMouse Site Availability Index, listing all the sites monitored, can be found on http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_social_networking_sites.php

WatchMouse finds poor site performance for many CAC40 listed companies - Surprisingly, Air France-KLM and France Telecom amongst the worst (2008-05-23)

Utrecht, the Netherlands, 20 May 2008 - WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, tested the sites belonging to France’s CAC40 listed companies for errors, availability and performance. Five of the 40 monitored sites were found to have ‘serious user issues’. These sites belong to L’Oreal, France Telecom, Air France-KLM, Lagardere and Danone. Air France-KLM, Lagardere and Danone's sites were also found to have an uptime score, well below the accepted industry standards.

During the two month monitoring period, one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations tried to access the homepage of the sites every five minutes. Sites were expected to download within 4 seconds without any errors. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a Site Performance Index 'SPI' for each of the sites. An SPI of ≤1,000 represents a ‘well performing’ site, 1,001 - 1,999 is regarded as ‘acceptable’, while a score of above 2,000 represents a site with ‘serious user issues’.

The poor SPI results of L’Oreal and France Telecom’s sites were due to very long load times while Air France-KLM, Lagardere and Donone’s sites were all found to have a significant number of errors, in-addition to very long load times.

WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors said, “As a telecommunications company, we’d expect France Telecom to have all the knowledge, facilities and desire to build a fast and reliable site. We’re therefore very surprised that this research found the France Telecom site operating well below industry standards.”

WatchMouse also reports on site uptime. In line with industry standards, WatchMouse ranks a site’s uptime as ‘good’ if it is ≥99.9%, ‘OK’ if it between 99.89% - 99.01% and ‘poor’ if it is ≤99%. Mark Pors points out that “99% uptime sounds great but when you calculate it, this means 80+ hours of downtime a year. That’s one working day per month.”

Of the CAC40 monitored sites, those with poor uptime results belong to: Air Liquide, Carrefour, Schneider Electric, Veolia Environnement, Danone, Air France-KLM and Lagardere. Lagardere’s site scored 89% uptime meaning it was unavailable for more than three days during the period of monitoring.

A complete overview of the CAC40 monitoring results can be found at: http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_CAC40_sites.php

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor the performance of their web sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in over 70 countries and checks from 25+ locations and networks worldwide (see www.watchmouse.com).

Contact: Mark Pors, mark@watchmouse.com +31302522400

WatchMouse finds poor site performance for some SMI listed companies - Richemont & Zurich Financial found to be the worst. (2008-05-23)

Utrecht, the Netherlands, 20 May 2008 - WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, tested the sites belonging to Switzerland’s SMI listed companies for errors, availability and performance. Three of the 20 monitored sites were found to have ‘serious user issues’. These sites belong to Baloise, Zurich Financial and Richemont. Zurich Financial and Richemont’s sites were also amongst six SMI sites found to have an uptime well below the accepted industry standard.

During the two month monitoring period, one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations tried to access the homepage of the sites every five minutes. Sites were expected to download within 4 seconds without any errors. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a Site Availability Index (SPI) for each of the sites. An SPI of ≤1,000 represents a ‘well performing’ site, 1,001 - 1,999 is regarded as ‘acceptable’, while a score of above 2,000 represents a site with ‘serious user issues’.

The poor SPI results of Richemont and Baloise sites were largely due to very long load times while the SPI result of Zurich Financial’s site was due to both long load times and a considerable number of errors.

Mark Pors said, “I would have anticipated Switzerland’s largest luxury goods and financial services companies to strive to provide their customers and investors with a fast, error free sites as an important channel through which they promote their products, services and build brand awareness. I am therefore, very surprised that this research found these major companies’ sites operating well below accepted industry standards.”

WatchMouse also reports on site uptime. In line with industry standards, WatchMouse ranks a site’s uptime as ‘good’ if it is ≥99.9%, ‘OK’ if it between 99.89% - 99.01% and ‘poor’ if it is ≤99%. WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors points out that “99% uptime sounds great but when you calculate it, this means 80+ hours of downtime a year. That’s one working day per month.”

Of the 20 monitored SIM sites, those with the worst uptime results belong to: Nobel Biocare, Richemont, Zurich Financial, Nestle, Adecco and Synthes. Synthes’s site scored 95% meaning it was unavailable for more than a day during monitoring.

A complete overview of the SMI monitoring results can be found at: http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_SMI_sites.php

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor the performance of their web sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in over 70 countries and checks from 25+ locations and networks worldwide (see www.watchmouse.com).

Contact: Mark Pors, mark@watchmouse.com +31302522400

WatchMouse provides independent worldwide monitoring of our sites (2010-01-13)

WatchMouse provides independent worldwide monitoring of our sites, supplementing our internal monitoring, to provide us frequently-updated metrics on availability and performance just as the user experiences. The WatchMouse service represents an exceptional value and time savings.

Jacob Moorman Director of Operations, SourceForge.net

Website performance is the key to customer satisfaction (2007-06-27)

How often have you typed in the Google URL and received a page that will not load? I am willing to bet that this is a rare occurrence. Despite its busy traffic, Google is a textbook example of a web site that has almost perfect performance and therefore serves a great number of satisfied customers. The market share of the search engine is a resounding confirmation of this. You are assisted quickly, so you come back sooner. Research conducted by JupiterResearch has revealed that visitors to a site only have 4 seconds of patience. If the site has not been loaded by that time, they leave. Error messages also prompt potential customers to go to the competition.

Why do organisations still devote so little attention to the effective availability of their site? Performance is the key to satisfied customers. For many companies, their web site is the face of the organisation. Consumers and also business users of the Internet use the wealth of information on the web to compare purchasing options. It is of immeasurable importance that they are also actually able to find what they are looking for. If this is not possible at one company, competitors are straining at the leash to offer their services through a correctly functioning site.

Coming back to the praise that we had for Google, we see that the search engine has made significant investments in the availability of its web site. The page is run by several machines at various sites. If one crashes there are enough back-up servers that can take over the traffic flows to guarantee optimum performance. In addition, the search machine invests a great deal of time and money in the right hardware and people. Although the site has a difficult task – searching through an index of billions of documents – it is almost always available and loads fast.

The actual site is unspectacular in construction. This applies to the majority of sites with a high level of availability. Simple sites such as the news site NU.nl are almost always easy to access. Nevertheless, it is not only the layout of the site that determines how the web page performs. Too many photos, long symbols and frills make web sites slower to respond. The fact that the ‘back end’ of the site is not efficiently programmed also contributes to longer loading times. Frequent consultation of background databases is also detrimental to the speed of the page.

Where it often goes wrong is when different people are working on a site, thereby disturbing the links between the various elements. The different parts of the site will work correctly, but the site as a whole will fail to perform. This means long waiting times for people who want to use the services of a company.

Service providers at the upper end of the market are becoming increasingly aware of this. The contracts that they use frequently include a service level agreement (SLA) for the part for which they are responsible. Nevertheless, they regularly make mistakes due to the fact that the promised performance is not subsequently verified (by an independent party). Although it is now essentially part of the contract, there is insufficient actual verification. Ideally, web site performance should become a permanent component of a contract. In addition, clear internal agreements must be made on who has final responsibility for the efficient loading and availability of a site.

Regular testing is also essential for the facilitation of good availability. This will prevent a great deal of errors, keeping the site up and running at crucial times. The storm that blew over the Netherlands at the end of January was a good opportunity to see which sites were prepared for extreme loads and which were not. The site of the Dutch weather institute, KNMI, was almost unreachable, while some logical thought could have protected them from this eventuality. If you know that a major storm is heading towards the country you can be sure that people will search for information on the weather and roads on the Internet. Sites such as those of KLM and Schiphol were also unreachable, while the specially created site Crisis.nl, which had been kept as simple as possible, was able to serve a large number of people.

Including ‘stress tests’ in a SLA or conducting them regularly in-house is therefore to be recommended. Companies can easily take control by ensuring that their service provider executes this type of test or by putting their own site under pressure. This is the best method of checking whether your web site can handle a sudden increase in visitor numbers. It is also good to know whether the servers on which your site is running actually ensure that your page is always available and loads correctly. For companies, it is crucial to see when they are off air. This can save them a large amount of money every year and will also reduce the number of irritated visitors to the site. This is how you keep customers satisfied and keep the company running.

Mark Pors
Chief Technology Officer at WatchMouse

WatchMouse provides site performance monitoring and stress test services

Facebook tops one list of 'slow and inaccessible' social networks (2010-01-13)

On Thursday, Web site-monitoring firm WatchMouse released the results of a study about the performance of 104 social-media sites--social networks, blogging communities, bookmarking sites, and the like--and boldly deemed them to be overall "slow and inaccessible."

Facebook: Slow And Unresponsive? (2010-01-13)

Contrary to a recent study that showed that Facebook is among the most reliable social networks, new study conducted by WatchMouse shows abysmal results for Facebook. 104 sites were monitored by WatchMouse, and Facebook was by far the worst performance-wise: it had slow loading times and frequent errors. Check out the graph (too big to show here) to see how bad it looks.