Server problems among such partners were causing the Deutsche Bank site to time out, preventing Deutsche Bank site visitors from making or maintaining connections. Response time is especially important today for United Parcel Service, since customers now track UPS deliveries in progress from their cell phones and their own Web sites, says Marc Dodge, manager of Internet and intranet systems. User tolerance for slow performance varies by site and the importance of the information they're seeking, says Bruce Linton, president of performance monitor WebHancer. They will sometimes wait 80 seconds for a page to download. But with Yahoo, expectations are much different.
People are much less forgiving.
Our job is staying alive longer than the next guy. That' s why CNN Interactive uses Keynote and WebHancer, plus homegrown monitoring tools. Based on these various data sources, the company has added redundancy as well as capacity for major news events The steps that these big organizations are taking to boost performance are clearly paying off. Three years ago, Keynote started tracking the performance of the top 40 business sites. At that time, their pages were downloading at an average of 7.8 seconds.