What is a grade, and how is it computed?
We compute the “grade” for a site on a given day by computing the time required to download a notional 10 KByte file. This time takes into account the time to open a connection to your server and the data transfer rate of your server in bytes per second (BPS). This data transfer rate is determined by the total time required to download your file and the size of the file. We use this BPS number to compute the time which would be required to download a 10 KByte file. Your grade is based on this time, plus the time required to establish a connection. Basing your performance grade on a notional 10k file ensures that comparisons across servers are roughly equal. Your server is tested every 15 minutes throughout the day, and an average download time is computed. (This value is also available as a part of the summary table at the top of your report.) After the average for your site is computed, this number is compared to similar data gathered for all of the sites we monitor – both customers a
We compute the “grade” for a site on a given day by computing the time to download a notional 10 KByte file. This time takes into account the DNS lookup time, the time to open a connection to your server, and the bytes per second (BPS) throughput to download the URL you supplied. This BPS number is normalized for a hypothetical 10 KByte file and the total download time is then computed. This is done every 15 minutes throughout the day, and an average download time is computed. (BTW, this value is also available as a part of the summary table at the top of your report.) After the average for your site is computed, this number is compared to similar data gathered for all of the sites we monitor – both customers and other representative sites. Your grade is then based its percentile rank, which indicates the percentage of servers which performed worse than yours. For example, if your server received a percentile rank of 70, this indicates that it performed better than 70% of the servers w
