Sites Performance Monitoring 2013
We monitored the web performance of the IR50 websites to compare the performance of the sites and to see how well each website handled the traffic
This article is work in progress as we collect more data. Keep checking.
Date: November 28 2013 from 00:00 EDT to November 29 2013 23:59:00 EDT
Desktop Web
We monitored the web performance of the IR50 websites (Excluding Grainger, McMaster-Carr and Symantec ) from our US Backbone Nodes using Internet Explorer browser. The goal was to compare the performance of the sites and to see how well each website handled the traffic during the event.
Sample size: 1500 test runs per site.
DNS Time:
Fastest: Avon 5 ms
Slowest: Victoria Secrets 217 ms

Wait Time:
Fastest: Staples 19 ms
Slowest: PC Connection 595 ms

Response Time:
Fastest: Rakuten 131 ms
Slowest: PC Connection 802 ms

Render Start Time:
Fastest: Rakuten 379 ms
Slowest: Vista Print 1,930 ms

Document Complete Time:
Fastest: Barnes and Noble 973 ms
Slowest: ToysRus: 4,317 ms

Web Page Response:
Fastest: Apple 1,677 ms
Slowest: Newegg: 6,709 ms

Total Downloaded Bytes:
Lightest Page: Dell 401 kbytes
Heaviest Page: Urban Outfitters: 4,200 kbytes

Number of Requests per Page:
Least: Netflix 36 requests
Most: Newegg 329 requests

Number of Hosts per Page:
Least: Apple and Gap 3 hosts
Most: Neiman Marcus 106 hosts

Correlation between Metrics:

Availability:

Notable Outages:
Shutterfly Mobile and Desktop:


Interval: 5 minutes from 8 US Cities (Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, New York, Phoenix, San Francisco, Washington DC)
Mobile Web
We monitored the web performance of the IR50 websites (Excluding Grainger, McMaster-Carr and Symantec ) from 16 4G Nodes in NY, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago DC, San Francisco, Dallas & Denver on both ATT & Verizon using an Iphone 5 (emulation). The goal was to compare the performance of the sites and to see how well each website handled the traffic during the event. Web sites that did not have a mobile web site version were slower.
Sample size: 1500 test runs per site.

Very impressed by the uptime of some of the mobile sites this year:

Metrics Calculation: Metrics display median value.
Document Complete: The time it takes the browser to download and render the page. This is the time when the browser states “Done” in the status bar – or the mouse changes from “Waiting” state to a pointer.
Render Start Time: The time it takes for the page to start displaying something other than white space.
The Catchpoint Team.
Photo by tshe