Keynote/Boardwatch Results

Wed Jul 9 19:44:56 UTC 1997

On Wed, 9 Jul 1997, Jack Rickard wrote:

Before you start with your claims, Jack, that I have something to lose,
you should realize that I am an independent consultant, and work for none
of the people in the study.

==>what looks LOGICAL to me, not anything I know or have tested.  I am rather
==>convinced that moving a single web site to another location, putting it on
==>larger iron, or using different OS will have very minor impact on the
==>numbers.

You may be convinced because of the theory you've developed to match the
flawed methodology with which the tests were performed. However, I have
some tests that I did to measure the connect delays on sites.

Here's the average for 200 web sites that were given to me when I polled
some people for their favorite sites (duplicates excluded):

(because in a lot of cases we're talking milliseconds, percentage is not
really fine enough, but this was to satisfy personal curiosity)

SYN -> SYN/ACK time (actual connection)			22%
Web browser says "Contacting www.website.com..."

SYN/ACK -> first data (web server work--		78%
getting material, processing material)
Web browser says "www.website.com contacted, waiting for response"

Note that this didn't include different types of content.  But it *did*
truly measure one thing--that the delay caused by web servers is
considerably higher than that of "network performance" (or actual connect
time).

And, the biggest beef is that you claimed Boardwatch's test was BACKBONE
NETWORK performance, not end-to-end user-perception performance.  You
threw in about 20 extra variables that cloud exactly what you were
measureing.  Not to mention completely misrepresenting what you actually
measured.

/cah