Hi all,

What are your preferred methods for verifying web site performance?

When a hosting customer complains that her web site is "slow", how do you quickly troubleshoot it and (providing it's not your company's fault) present something to the customer that she will respect without sounding like you're passing the buck?

TRACERT? PING? Web Resource? Special app? What are your faves?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Hi :)

There is a freeware app called cyberkit, get one at www.cyberkit.net , my fav is neotrace from neoworx

:)

Originally posted by Circa3000

When a hosting customer complains that her web site is "slow", how do you quickly troubleshoot it and (providing it's not your company's fault) present something to the customer that she will respect without sounding like you're passing the buck?


We take a slightly different approach. The problem is, no matter what you present to a customer if they are convinced it is your fault, no matter what you show to them, they won't want to listen.

Here are the troubleshooting steps we follow:

1. Find out exactly what the customer means by slow (is the response in general slow, is it slow when doing database queries, executing CGI, etc).
2. Load the site, if it loads fine.
3. Run the uptime command to make sure the server has not had a significant load on it recently.
4. Run pings and traceroutes, and check with our monitoring services to make sure all is okay.
5. If everything looks okay from our end, we have our customers run a 50 ping test (on Windows: ping -n 50 IP.ADD.RE.SS) to their site, and a well known site (Yahoo! or Aamazon usually) and a traceroute and send them to us.
6. If there do not appear to be any problems, we let them know and suggest the problem may be internal to their network.
7. If it looks like there is a problem, we either have them contact their provider, or we contact UUNET to have them look at it (depending on where the problem occurs within their traceroute).

The reason we like this method, is that it allows the customer to prove to themselves that there is no problem, and it does not give the feeling of ganging up on them (ie look here's a bunch of numbers you don't know how to read that prove we're cooler than you are :D). We find anytime we can include a customer in finding a resolution, they are usually more satisfied with the results.