Computer systems play an increasingly crucial and ubiquitous role in human endeavour by carrying out or facilitating tasks and providing information and services. How much work these systems can accomplish, within a certain amount of time, using a certain amount of resources, characterises the systems’ performance, which is a major concern when the systems are planned, designed, implemented, deployed, and evolve. As one of the most popular computer systems, the Web is inevitably scrutinised in terms of performance analysis that deals with its speed, capacity, resource utilisation, and availability. Performance analyses for the Web are normally done from the perspective of the Web servers and the underlying network (the Internet). This research, on the other hand, approaches Web performance analysis from the perspective of Web pages. The performance metric of interest here is response time. Response time is studied as an attribute of Web pages, instead of being considered purely a result of network and server conditions. A framework that consists of measurement, modelling, and monitoring (3Ms) of Web pages that revolves around response time is adopted to support the performance analysis activity. The measurement module enables Web page response time to be measured and is used to support the modelling module, which in turn provides references for the monitoring module. The monitoring module estimates response time. The three modules are used in the software development lifecycle to ensure that developed Web pages deliver at worst satisfactory response time (within a maximum acceptable time), or preferably much better response time, thereby maximising the efficiency of the pages. The framework proposes a systematic way to understand response time as it is related to specific characteristics of Web pages and explains how individual Web page response time can be examined and improved.
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