Testing, Measuring, and Diagnosing Web Sites from the Users' Perspective

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 are very important issues, 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.