Furthermore, DSL which stands for Digital Subscriber Line is a more efficient type of internet connection. It uses existing 2 wires that are with the telephone line so service is delivered simultaneously with wired telephone service; it won’t change the speed of the internet or the telephone like dial-up connection does. DSL connection speed ranges from 128 kbps to 9Mbps which is a lot faster than other connections like dial-up and ISDN.
The best internet connection is broadband. It is the most used form of Internet access because of its high access speeds. Broadband is defined as a high bandwidth connection to the Internet. Broadband is easier and faster to use than the traditional telephone and modem as information can be sent and downloaded much quicker. Broadband can be provided over your phone line, via cable or via satellite. It involves large volumes of information being carried at high speeds to your PC. This allows websites, text, graphics, music and videos to be experienced in real time. The average speed of broadband is 28.9Mbps.
The website should be fast responding so that the viewer can do what they want straight away and not get frustrated that they have to wait for pages to load. The higher internet speed the better the website.
PC Performance Factors
Browsers
A web browser is a for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the . present in resources enable users easily to navigate their to related resources. Although browsers are primarily intended to use the World Wide Web, they can also be used to access information provided by in or files in . The major web browsers that people use because they are fast and efficient are and .
Websites that contain large amounts of media like images or videos require fast Internet speed. Each browser has the ability to download and display these, but some may do it faster. Browsing speeds also vary when you open multiple tabs. While one browser might be faster with only one window up, another browser could win with multiple tabs open. Additionally, one browser could be faster than others at loading a single URL from the address bar.
Cache
Cache is a special high-speed mechanism. Cache can be either a reserved section of or an independent high-speed . Browser cache, also known as temporary internet files folder contains files from websites you have visited. The majority of web browsers maintain a cache of files. This is good because it allows faster display of web pages the next time you open those websites. Instead of data being retrieved from the web server, the files are picked up from the browser cache which speeds up the display of the web page. You can anytime you want without any problems. Sometimes it is advised to clean up the temporary internet files. It is advised if you want to free up hard disk space, sometimes the cache might clash with online versions and at times you might be faced with a browser that refuses to load the fresher content from the server and continues to dig it up from the cache. Other than increasing the speed that a page loads other advantages include:
- saving on costly use of bandwidth
- imposing controls on access to dubious material
- collecting useful statistics on web access
- providing cached resources even when origin server is down
Server Side Factors
Available Bandwidth
Bandwidth is defined as a range within a band of frequencies or wavelengths. Bandwidth is also defined as the amount of that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. Bandwidth refers to how much data your Internet connection can transmit; the more bandwidth you have, the more data you can load at once this means the more bandwidth you have the faster websites, videos and images will load.
Number of Hits
Each time a user visits a , it is called a page view. Page views are tracked by monitoring applications to record a website's traffic. The more page views a website has, the more traffic it is receiving. However, since a page view is recorded each time a Web page is loaded, a single user can have many page views on one website. Therefore, unique page views are commonly tracked to log the number of different visitors a website receives in a given time period. The more hits the website has the more traffic the website has which means it could slow down the performance of a website because lots of people are trying to access it at one time.
Image Files
JPG is a file extension for a graphics file. The file extension is used interchangeably with JPG. stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group who created the standard. JPG files have 2 sub-formats, JPG/Exif (often used in digital cameras and photographic equipment), and JPG/JFIF (often used on the ). JPG files can be opened by most image editing , from Microsoft Paint to Adobe Photoshop. Its purpose is to provide a visual to anything from websites to presentations.
The Graphics Interchange Format also known as a GIF is a that was introduced by and has since come into widespread usage on the due to its wide support and portability. The format supports up to for each image, it also supports . A gif in simple terms is an image with animation.
Sound Files
MP3 is an for which uses a form of . It is a common audio format for consumer audio or storage, as well as a of digital audio compression for the transfer and playback of music on most .
Video and Animation Files
SWF stands for Shockwave Flash File Format and is owned by adobe. SWF can contain video and vector based animations and sound and are designed for efficient delivery over the web.