Dotcom-Monitor Web Performance Blog

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Test Your Website Across IPv6

September 25, 2015

The age of IPv6 is Upon Us ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers is the authority in charge of distributing IP addresses in North America.  ARIN received the IPv4

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Third-Party Content Monitoring

June 29, 2015

Most websites that exist today rely on third-party elements in one form or another.  For example, there are many services to gather analytics about site traffic such as Google analytics,

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IPv6 Test vs IPv4: Testing Errors & Resolution Issues

November 24, 2014

Take a look at the difference between how a page (msnbc.com) loads from an IPv6-Only monitoring location and a monitoring location with native IPv6 or 6to4 translation. You may want to think about running an IPv6 test on your own websites after seeing these results.

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How To Monitor Voice Connectivity – Inbound Line & SIP Monitoring

July 21, 2014

Voice Connectivity is Critical. Your phone systems have gone down and you are unable to communicate with your customers. After several hours of troubleshooting you have managed to get the services up again but what do you do now? Whether you utilize a SIP based VoIP system, digital voice over T1 lines or POTS (plain old telephone service), those voice services need to be available.

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New Features to Test How DNS Caching Affects Your Website

July 10, 2014

The new DNS caching features at Dotcom-Monitor allow you to perform some interesting tests that show how DNS caching can affect your page load speed.

We realize that many organizations monitor their online services with a number different goals in mind, and so we listened to the feedback we received that some users want to include the DNS response time in their monitoring and some users want to be able to remove DNS response from their monitors.

How you wish to handle DNS response time in regard to your monitoring needs is up to you, but we want to take this opportunity to show the differences in how DNS response time affects website load using our new tools.

We ran a test monitoring YouTube from a single location in the midwest United States with three different DNS cache settings. A basic HTTP full page load on the YouTube front page resulted in some interesting, although not that surprising results.

Keep in mind the results will vary depending upon a number of variables such as which locations you are monitoring from, the time of day, the load on the DNS servers, and on the website servers.

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Waterfall Chart: Data Visualization for Web Performance Analysis

February 18, 2014

A waterfall chart, a form of data visualization that maps the cumulative effect of sequentially introduced values, can help. When tracking Web performance, a waterfall chart can help determine how long it takes for each action between the Web server and the user when a user accesses a website. This data can help website administrators understand how individual elements of a their sites are impacting performance.

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Time to Interact: A New Metric for Measuring User Experience

February 3, 2014

A new performance metric has come on the scene that is less about measuring the actual time it takes for an entire page to load and more about measuring how long it takes for the page to deliver the experience the website visitor is seeking. Time to Interact (TTI) pinpoints the most critical moment in a page load—the moment the page’s primary interactive content is displayed and becomes interactive –from the end user’s perspective. Proponents say this is the new metric to watch because users do not need to wait until the entire page loads to begin to interact with the site. Ideally their experience with a website using TTI as an indicator would be better than using TTL (Time to Load).

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