Very Slow Server Response Times

At this time of highly advanced technology, people seem to be getting more impatient than ever. Our fast-paced societies have given rise to drive-throughs, in which we can queue for and have our McDonald's burger in less than a minute. Sports cars, which virtually fly in highways, are an increasing sight. Couples are no longer hoping for stability—live-ins and civil marriages, as well as secret marriages—are not unusual. Teenagers as young as 14 are getting pregnant (could be more than impatience). Everywhere you turn in the metropolis, people are hurrying—to start work, to go home, to hail a cab, whatever. This impatience is a trademark of this generation. Even the Internet is not excluded: from dial-up, to LAN, and now, to broadband.

But sometimes even the Internet, the source of quick comfort and ease, can be irritating and slow as well. As Internet users, you know the feeling when your Yahoo! homepage seems to take years to load. Or when you've got only a minute before the bus arrives and your mail is still loading the welcome picture. We know.

Even when you have a high-speed Internet connection, you could still experience slow server response. If you are a site owner, beware of this. A slow response does not only disrupt interaction with your site's visitors; it also leads to less trust and more difficulty for the users to pursue their other plans. If it is an advertising site you own, you have a bigger problem. Visitors to your site can easily be tempted to visit your competitor's site and possibly avail of their services or buy their products if yours is just too slow in responding. Thus, slow server response time equals more frustrated users (or customers) equals lower revenue and less visitors.

There are two major reasons why your site downloads slowly. The first is when your web page size is too large. If your site contains code and content which was not optimized for the Web, then expect slow download. To avoid this, your pictures and graphics must be reduced in size to be downloaded quickly. Likewise, if your pages are built with so much code, such as when long style sheets are included in every page, there are numerous scripts, etc., expect a slower response. Leading sites--Yahoo! for instance--try to avoid large pages by dedicating their resources exclusively for optimizing their pages and maintaining short response times.

The second common culprit of slow download is a slow server. When you've got a slow server, you have no other choice. But there are cases when it is not directly your server's fault. If your site has many users, you're lucky. But some of your users are not. When your server resources are used up, some of your users can experience getting an error message. Your customers won't like that.

At nighttime, servers turn to energy-saving modes. This leads to an error message for both local visitors browsing at night and international visitors in their corresponding time zones. Visitors will have to wait until your server wakes up. But they usually don't.

If you have many foreign visitors, your server might response slower, too. In this case, it would be better to reduce your site's graphics and pictures. Try to mirror your site on international servers as well. Finally, Christmas shopping leads to slow response times. Don't ask.

Before planning your server's capacity, it is worthwhile to know the standard guidelines for response times. For your sites visitor not to sense any interruption, your site must load in 0.1 second. Take note that this is the ideal response time. One second is the longest acceptable response time. When it takes longer than a second for your site to appear completely, your visitor will sense the disruption. If your site takes longer (up to 10 seconds) to download, good-bye visitor.

Leaders in search engine optimization (SEO) agree that the server response time is of moderate importance. They believe that it limits your site's crawlerability. Some of them find a slow server response acceptable once in a while, but not always. If your server is always unforgivably slow, they suggest that you think over just how important your site is. If it is sometimes slow, try putting good elevator music.