Webserver Traffic Monitoring Tips

Measuring internal web server response time

The most important factor to look at is your high water mark of HTTP requests per second and your end-to-end response time during this high-usage period.  This response time is the total elapsed time between receipt of the request and the end of sending the requested HTML.  Some use the "Time To First Byte"(TTBF) metric to measure webserver response time.

Measuring external web server response time

If you are interested in knowing how your mission critical web site behaves over the web you need a tool that will poll your pages from remote locations and report-back the page loading time.

If you are interested in a more comprehensive tool, Keynote
 is great.  You can find some of their solution sets here:  which includes a "Competitive Intelligence Research" I'm sure you'd find intriguing.  You can also get a free evaluation from Keynote which includes their external monitoring tools, performance indices to compare yourself against competitors, health checks, and much more.

You can use this page to diagnose a website and see your page load sizes. If you use FrontPage, this tool has HTML compression.