What I’m Reading

Gomez, a provider of Internet performance stats, has compiled its knowledge into a visual map of the world that uses colors to show how fast web sites are performing for customers in various geographies. The map showcases aspects such as DNS lookup times, throughput, response times, and other elements, with green meaning everything is all good, and red indicating problems.

I was surprised at how often red showed up, but Gomez doesn’t provide much detail other than that, so it’s hard to understand how bad a service has to be before it’s in the red. The results come from more than 150,000 people who run Gomez’s performance management software on their machines and share the results with the company. Gomez was purchased by Compuware in 2009 and several of the nation’s top web sites rely on a (presumably) more sophisticated version of this map.

Gomez notes that this tool can be useful for web site owners who can now see if problems are in their data center or at the last mile of the network, as well as for consumers who can check the map to see if slow performance is widespread and might indicate a larger issue behind why they are having troubles connecting or loading pages.

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