(2) Viewers, Browsers, and WWW Performance

Dermatology Online Journal, July 1995
Volume 1, Number 1

From: boutell@netcom.com (Thomas Boutell)
Subject: World Wide Web Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), Part 2/2
Date: 15 Mar 1995 20:07:00 GMT
Archive-name: www/faq/part2
Last-modified: 1995/26/1

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5.6: How fast does my net connection need to be?

   The following response to this very-frequently-asked-question was
   provided by Mike Meyer (mwm@contessa.phone.net).
   
     The answer is "It depends." What it depends on is what kind of
     things you want to provide on your server. Here are some rules of
     thumb to use when deciding what kind of connection you need for your
     server.
     
     The first rule of thumb is:
     
     Don't worry about simultaneous access.
     
     Unless you have a very large site, simultaneous access is not a
     problem. If you have a very large site, you need as much bandwidth
     as you can afford. There is a bit more about this below.
     
     The second rule of thumb is:
 
     It should take at most 5 seconds to send a page.
     
     The five second rule dates from command line days, when that was
     about how long people would wait before getting impatient with the
     system. It seems like a reasonable number to use now.
     
     Since external images/audio/etc. are somewhat exceptional, allow
     more time for them. If you think they should have the same
     restrictions as above, buy the bandwidth your site will need to do
     so. However, the rule of thumb for external images/audio/etc is:
     
     It should take at most 30 seconds to send an external file.
     
     Given these rules, it's pretty straightforward to work out how large
     an HTML page and external files can be. At least, it's easy after
     you simplify things by ignoring IP overhead on the line, compression
     on modem lines, and anything that's less than 10% of the total (or
     even a little bit more than 10%).
     
     The one simplification not to ignore is the multiple packet
     round-trips it takes to get data flowing through an HTTP channel.
     For modem lines, this is nearly a second for each HTTP connection,
     which is significant. For leased lines, it's more like .1 or .2
     seconds, which is not significant.