




However, if we assume a user with a high-speed connection and a site whose servers are not overloaded — as is typical of a business to business (“B2B”) interaction — then only two significant factors remain: site design and Internet latency between the client and the server [Sper1995] [Heid1997] [Touc1998]. In this paper we analyze measurement data based on test pages to explore various relationships between Web page design and page download time. Concentrating on information about the page and measures of Internet round trip time, we develop several specialized formulae to predict typical page download times in a B2B environment.
After some introductory discussion of Web download components and experimental setup, the first part of this paper identifies packet count, rather than page size, as the crucial predictor of download time. We indicate how to calculate packet count in the absence of packet sniffer software. Next, we explore page download time as a function of page size, in a single-threaded environment. Here we build two different linear models to understand the bulk of page download for simple test pages.
On the Internet, all information is carried in packets. Network transfer times are not affected by the type of content being transmitted in those packets, but they are strongly influenced by the number of packets, and possibly even by their sizes. Also, the time required to set up a flow of packets is much larger than the amount of time between successive packets in a single connection. The basic performance principle is therefore to make fewer requests and transmit fewer packets. From this principle, we can derive two basic design rules for wellperforming Web pages. First, reduce the overall size of the page, thereby reducing the number of bytes (and packets) to be transferred over the Internet. Second, limit the number of embedded objects on the page, such as images, each of which must be requested and transferred separately from server to browser.