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| 21 August 2006 | 
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Figure of Merit for Response Time Measurement
An organization called Apdex is promoting use of a new and interesting generic Applications Performance Index (Apdex Index) that allows comparison of website performance in a quantitative way. This work has been picked up in the technical press; here is a typical story: New Metric Promises to Illuminate Application Performance The Apdex Index is based on whole-page loading times, and on a pre-defined threshold time value T secs. The recommended T value is 4.0 secs. If pages generally load faster than the threshold, a user is presumed "satisfied" with the performance. If pages load slower than that, but faster than four times T (16 seconds, for example) a user is viewed as "tolerating" that performance. Anything slower (greater than 16 seconds, for example) and the user is termed "frustrated". The Apdex Index formula is as follows: ( #satisfied + ( #tolerating / 2) ) / #total After applying this formula to a website (a set of pages) or to a particular page (downloading it 100's of times) Apdex's comparative scoring rules are as follows:
Getting the values from an eValid site analysis run is a simple matter, as shown in this step by step Apdex Analysis Setup instruction page. As an auxiliary application beyond measuring general website speed, the Apdex folks also point out the Apdex Indes is a fairly good way to rank order Business IT Alignment when different parts of a website are aiming at difference performance levels.
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