Tag Archives: HTTP

The Surprising Effect of Distance on Download Speed

August 08th, 2008 - 1:39PM

Let’s start with a question. What download speed would you expect in this scenario? If you just think of network connections as a simple pipe, then you might expect the download speed to be approximately the same as the slowest network connection, i.e. 20 Mbps. When we tested this out using a local UK based website with a ping time of 13 ms we saw this: The download speed of 1.57 MB /s or 12.56 Mbps (i.e. 1.57 x 8 for 8 bits per byte) was over 60% of the theoretical maximum for the internet connection. That’s quite respectable if … Continue reading →

New Ajax Page in the HTTP Gallery

June 06th, 2008 - 9:00AM

We’ve added a page to our HTTP Gallery that provides an introduction to Ajax and some simple working examples. The new page is available here: http://www.httpwatch.com/httpgallery/ajax/ BTW, you can view the AJAX requests made by this page using the free Basic Edition of HttpWatch.

Using HttpWatch to Measure Page Load Times for New and Existing Users

May 05th, 2008 - 6:22PM

If you’re tuning a web page’s performance there are two types of visitors that you need to be concerned about: A new visitor to your site who won’t have any of your pages, scripts, CSS or images in their browser cache. An existing user of your site who will have your cacheable pages, scripts, CSS or images in their browser cache. Visitor type 1) is said to be in the Empty Cache state and Vistor type 2) is said to be in the Primed Cache state. Optimizing for visitors with an empty cache is important as their initial impressions of your site … Continue reading →