Measuring of Web Performance as Perceived by End-Users

Abstract

Users perceive good Internet performance as characterized by low latency, high throughput, and high availability. When browsing the Web, users are concerned with the performance of entire pages. Understanding and identifying the sources of the performance problems is a very important issue, especially for e-business. Therefore, there is the need to have a service for testing and measuring e-business Web site performance from the perspective of the end-users. We present our contribution in this area, that is, the Wing free service that has been developed for the purpose of Web transaction visualization. Our Web client that probes a target Web site is a real Web browser (MS IE), so the user can observe how a particular browser uses the network. Such known tools use their own Web browsing methods. Therefore, the solutions can be different from that used by real browsers and the results can be inadequate. Wing helps identify inefficient network usage by the browser and helps to tune Web pages to use the network efficiently. Therefore, Wing can be a good analysis tool for Web page and network application developers. Wing was used in an extensive study of WUTs Web access characteristics using statistical and data mining analysis methods. We also introduce the MWING system, which is based on our experiences from Wing project. MWING is a generic automated distributed multiagent-based measurement framework for running different measurement, testing and diagnosing tasks related to Internet; for example, in Internet topology discovering, Web benchmarking, or Grid services performance studies. One of possible agents can be Winglike agents downloading different Web pages in periodic experiments from many agent locations.