September 30, 1996
If Our Site is Slow, Please Click Here
By Bob O'Donnell
As the Internet continues to expand at its current torrid pace, Web surfers are facing
increasingly longer wait times as they move from Web site to Web site. At the same time,
the number of users coming onto the Internet is increasing by leaps and bounds. As a
result, the traffic at popular sites is increasing, causing slowdowns as visitors move
from page to page within a site.
Many sites on the Web are facing these difficulties, and, unfortunately, we're one of
them. InfoWorld Electric's performance has been painfully slow over the last few weeks,
causing a number of you to howl in protest. We hear you.
In fact, we are very aware of the problem and are focusing a great deal of effort
toward fixing it. The problem is a vexing one because we've been monitoring many of the
traditional bottlenecks for some time and haven't been able to find any easy answers. In
fact, there have been several in-house debates with many knowledgeable people about what
could be causing the problem, and none of the solutions have produced lasting results.
As a result, we're outsourcing. We're bringing in a team of performance consultants to
tear apart our system piece by piece and make whatever changes are necessary to improve
it. They'll be looking at the Silicon Graphics Inc. Challenge server we run on, the
Netscape Communications Corp. server that fills the page requests, the firewall and
routers between our server, our Internet service provider (ISP), the T1 connection to our
ISP, our Domain Name Server, the HTML page design, the route from our server to an
Internet backbone - in short, everything that could possibly affect the speed at which
pages from our site show up on your screen. The bottom line is that we expect to see
significant performance improvements over the next few weeks.
As the process moves along, we'd love to hear from you about how we're doing.
In the meantime, we ask for your patience. Our goal is to have a blazingly fast site
that will never stand in your way of finding the information you want. We think we'll be
there soon.
©
Copyright 1996, by InfoWorld Publishing Corp., a
subsidiary of IDG Communications, Inc. Reprinted from InfoWorld,
155 Bovet Road, San Mateo, CA 94402. Further reproduction is prohibited.
