Website Speed
Although we are connected by a Tier-1 network to both UK and US servers sometimes the throughput
will show as about a Terabit a second. This is caused by very small index pages of sites being transferred
from very fast servers. The numbers are so small you would need some form of scaling system or other
insurmountable task to accomplish. Generally, anyone with an index page of 2k or above gets a
sensible throughput figure. Below that just assume that it is effectively instantanious.
Latency Figure
The latency figure given in seconds is the time elapsed between the request for a stream to the
webserver be opened and the pointer being returned. In effect this measures the initial latent
delay of the network and the remote web server. Random results may be just that, see below...
Random or Bad Results
Sometimes you will see a bad result from even the best server. Although repeated bad scores does
not bode well for either your connectivity or your server, occasional blips are to be expected. These
seem to be most commonly caused by transient network conditions or you happening to hit your
server as it reloads a memory cache (or needs rebooted if it's IIS). If you get a bad result
you can check transient network conditions to the server with a traceroute tool.
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