How to Evaluate the Performance of Your Web Site: The Web Timing Framework
📜 Abstract
The increasing importance of the Web has made the performance of Web sites a crucial concern, both for end users and for service providers. In recent years the Internet research community has developed server-side, network-based, and client-side approaches to evaluate the performance of a Web site. In this paper, we argue that none of these approaches alone suffices to fully understand and characterize the performance of all parts involved in the Web transaction. We present and discuss a Web Timing Framework based on the analysis of recent work, which for the first time offers an integral approach to top-down Web performance evaluation. This framework is flexible enough to incorporate future research results. We also present WebTP, a tool based on our framework, which allows the seamless integration and correlation of results in a user-friendly graphical environment.
✨ Summary
The paper “How to Evaluate the Performance of Your Web Site: The Web Timing Framework” by Fabian E. Bustamante and Y. Charlie Hu, published in 2001, presents a novel Web Timing Framework intended to provide comprehensive insights into web performance. The authors argue that previous performance evaluation methods, such as server-side or client-side analyses, are insufficient when used individually for understanding the totality of web transactions. The introduced framework integrates these methodologies to offer a more holistic evaluation of web performance. WebTP, a tool based on this framework, is showcased as a means to facilitate the integration and correlation of web performance results in an accessible manner.
Research impact: Quick web searches reveal little direct citation or use of this paper in later works, which suggests it might not have significantly influenced subsequent research or industry standards. It is possible that the framework might have indirectly informed web performance tools or considerations in later years, but no direct references were found in a brief search timeframe.