Gold class Internet

• Article 2 of 77
• Information Age, November 2000
• View the original article online

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Eight seconds. That’s all it takes. No matter how good the marketing campaign, the word of mouth, the product or even the after-sales service, eight seconds is all it takes for hard-earned customers to leave a company for its competitor. Because, more often than not, it’s a competitor that a frustrated customer will go to after a web page has failed to load within eight seconds of their arrival at a web site.

Zona Research calculates that £2.6 billion of revenue is lost each year from purchases not made as a result of slow web sites. Nielsen/WebRatings has shown that users view more web pages if they can access them faster. Jupiter Communications found that 75% of sites with high traffic levels received complaints from users regarding slow page delivery and 42% of these sites reported complaints from users of pages failing to load. Various studies have shown that up to 35% of customers at an e-Commerce site will abandon their shopping cart after a wait of a minute. Even more worrying is that 24% switch services after a site outage.

“Last Christmas, there was a massive fiasco in the States over toy store web sites,” says David Caddis, vice president and general manager of e-business assurance at Candle Corporation. “Orders weren’t being delivered or were turning up late. Not only did that stop people going back to the web sites, but they stopped going to the stores, too. A bad experience on the web translates not just into bad returns but also changes in brand loyalty off the web.” Levis shut down its fledgling site and bailed out of the e-retail business when it realised its systems were unable to cope with demand.

What are CIOs doing to prevent their businesses going the same way? Many are taking the prudent option of first finding out what the user experience is like at their companies’ sites, rather than investing in upgrades the firms don’t need. Indeed, before the sites even get users, many beta test them to estimate how they will perform in a real-world situation. The tests they use are as ‘real-world’ as possible, so they don’t make assumptions about the site that won’t actually be true outside the test.

But Caddis says, “We had some customers who built large web sites. They tested them and thought they were great. When we tested the sites, they were shocked. The end user was experiencing 12.5-13 seconds, even though the tests had been serving in eight seconds. The tests had all been done on T1 lines (fast connections that can cope with large amounts of data), whereas people were accessing from a variety of different systems outside.”

Andy Crosby, field market manager for Mercury Interactive, says that of the 500 sites his company’s tested in the last three quarters, although there was no single problem which caused the most slowdowns, 97% of the sites had a critical problem. Equally bad, 70% of sites failed to reach 30% of their intended capability (and therefore revenue). His company has centres all over the world that can bombard sites with traffic from over 100,000 simulated users from many apparent locations. By seeing how the sites responds as the traffic is increased, Mercury can provide feedback on how the site is faring. “After three to five tests, we can usually increase performance five times. It’s partly a configuration issue. Just by retuning the application or web server, you can see some really good returns.” Despite such universal a problem with web site performance, most of his call-outs have been in the last week before sites have gone live. “Most say ‘we haven’t had time to test it’,” he admits.

Monitoring tools range from the simple to the complicated. The IT manager of one online banking site asked relatives with stopwatches to record their access times at different times of the day. Richard Marsh, an administrator at Vodaphone, which uses Candle’s ETEWatch, has been able to use the monitoring tool to determine whether the company’s Gemini web-based call-centre application is performing as it’s supposed to. “We can see how long Gemini takes to call up business account numbers and customer telephone numbers, two transactions performed thousands of times a day. From this, we can ask developers to see whether the performance of the underlying code that actions these requests can be improved.”

Similarly, Tonic for HTTP (hypertext transport protocol: the protocol web browsers use to let web servers know what they need and web servers use to provide the required data) from Tonic Software simulates Internet traffic through a site then provides warnings if the performance drops below tolerance levels. It can also conduct stress tests, identify performance bottlenecks and simulate millions of concurrent users interacting with a web application from locations around the world. Caddis’ company Candle has a couple of offerings that are downloaded or installed to the client and monitor it from there, before reporting back to the server the full user experience.

After the site goes live, analysis of server logs provides information about the user experience, as do robots that automatically probe the sites at different times to determine access times and availability from different parts of the world; companies that provide this service need to have physical points of presence on the Internet all over the world.

The results of these tests usually indicate that its the web pages themselves that need fixing, not the infrastructure. Caddis suggests moving objects that aren’t needed on the home page onto other pages – most of the time, users just click through before the objects have even resolved. German broadcaster Orb found most of the information on its site was being ignored because it was on navigation pages. By moving it to pages where there was more information content anyway, it found users were reading the information they’d ignored on other pages and sped up the navigation pages significantly.

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