A good web site monitoring service can do much more than simply send an alert when a ocado.com. The best services will break down the response period of a web request into important categories that will enable the system administrator or webmaster to optimize the server or application to provide the best possible overall response time.
Listed below are 5 key components of response time for an HTTP request:
1.DNS Lookup Time: The time it takes to get the authoritative name server for that domain and for that server to eliminate the hostname provided and return the right IP address. If this time is just too long the DNS server should be optimized in order to provide a faster response.
2.Connect Time: The time has come required for the net server to respond to an incoming (TCP) socket connection and ask for and to respond by setting up the connection. If this describes slow it usually indicates the os is trying to reply to more requests laptop or computer can handle.
3.SSL Handshake: For pages secured by SSL, it is now time required for both sides to negotiate the handshake process and hang up the secure connection.
4.Time to First Byte (TTFB): It is now time it takes for your web server to reply with the first byte of content following your request is sent. Slow times here typically mean the web application is inefficient. Possible reasons include inadequate server resources, slow database queries along with other inefficiencies linked to application development.
5.Time to Last Byte (TTLB): It is now time needed to return every one of the content, following the request continues to be processed. If this is taking too much time it usually suggests that the Internet connection is just too slow or is overloaded. Increasing bandwidth or acquiring dedicated bandwidth should resolve this issue.
It is extremely hard to diagnose slow HTTP response times without this information. Without the important response data, administrators are left to guess about in which the problem lies. Lots of time and money may be wasted trying to improve different aspects of the web application with the hope that something will continue to work. It's possible to completely overhaul an online server and application only to find out the whole problem was really slow DNS responses; an issue which exists on the different server altogether.
Make use of a website monitoring service that will a lot more than provide simple outage alerts. The most effective services will break the response time into meaningful parts that can allow the administrator in order to identify and correct performance problems efficiently.