There are quite a few companies springing up that are making their business out of testing just how well a company's Web site functions under stress.
Web and e-commerce site performance is obviously critical to an online business's success, as surfers become more impatient with wait times associated with cruising their favorite sites.
Surfers are also going to expect more from a Web or e-commerce site. They aren't going to be satisfied with simple graphic presentations - audio, video, and fresh content are all important. And given that broadband connections will become more commonplace, their PCs will be able to handle this type of content.
Among the companies pitching Web-performance software is newly launched Caw Networks, which first demonstrated its testing software, WebAvalanche, at Demo 2001 and formally released its appliance March 5.
Caw Networks, which was founded in November 1999 and is headquartered in Mountain View Calif., designed a test appliance that lets users stress-test their sites prior to going live with content. Site developers want to make sure that surfers don't reach a dead end. WebAvalanche sits outside of a company's router and firewall, generating about 10,000 hits per second and maintaining 1 million concurrent sessions.
For security reasons, control over the box is maintained by a network administrator host-device behind the site's firewall and router. The system administrator has a Web-based graphical user interface that allows for traffic generation, management, and analysis.
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