Web Performance Tuning

Web Performance Measuring Tools and Services

Now that we know about some web benchmarks, let’s look at some tools and services that give us web performance information. Note that the IETF is working on standards for measuring performance of the Internet itself. See http://io.advanced.org/IPPM/. Merit has some analysis of Internet performance statistics at http://www.merit.edu/ipma/analysis/.

Some web performance monitoring tools and services are included here as well. Web performance monitoring is automatic web performance measurement at regular intervals. This is very useful for site maintenance and can be linked to a pager so that the webmaster can get immediate notification when the site is down or unusually slow. Performance monitoring is important for planning capacity expansion:

AIM (http://www.aim.com/)

AIM Technology provides performance measurement software and services for Unix and NT systems.

ARM (http://hpcc923.external.hp.com/openview/rpm/papers.armwp.htm)

The Application Response Measurement API provides a standard way to characterize resource consumption by a particular application, even in a distributed environment. It was developed by Hewlett-Packard and Tivoli Systems. It is a good idea, but it requires that software developers instrument their code using this API. To date, few software vendors have released ARM-compliant code.

Baseline (http://www.teamquest.com/)

Baseline is a product from TeamQuest that reports performance of CPU, disk, buffer cache, etc., for ...