It is unfortunately a well-accepted fact that many company Web sites lack both performance and latency. What is worrying, however, is that a high number of these companies don`t have the slightest idea as to the real nature of the problem - conveniently blaming it on their respective Internet service providers (ISPs).
"Companies receive phone calls or e-mails from customers with concerns about site performance, after which they immediately phone their ISP. And not surprisingly, the ISP then tells them everything looks just fine," comments Alex Faul, account manager at Compuware SA.
New Media, a division of Detroit Newspapers in the US, handles the electronic distribution of five Internet sites. The Web team at New Media found they were receiving many complaints from users regarding performance issues, but were unable to pinpoint the reasons for the slowdowns.
New Media therefore decided to use Compuware`s PointForward Performance Monitoring to identify the problem areas and find solutions.
Says Tom Glaztek, technology and design manager at New Media: "We had always thought that our performance and latency issues were caused by our ISP, but we were wrong, it was in our own backyard.
"PointForward identified the real source of the problem, which was improving the speed of page delivery on the production end. This enabled us to refocus our production standards dealing with glitches such as image sizes."
Compuware also gave New Media performance numbers from different points of presence all over the US and Europe.
"We were surprised to find that in many cases our sites performed better in remote areas, faring poorly in Detroit and surrounding areas," says Glaztek. "This answered our bandwidth and networking queries."
"PointForward acts as an objective party with no hidden agendas. Our team can accurately identify problem areas, assisting companies to improve their site performance, not always using an ISP as a scapegoat," concludes Faul.
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