Frequency and location of tests
Gomez monitors transactions from five geographically dispersed co-location facilities across multiple network providers within Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and Malaysia at regular 60-minute intervals 24 hours a day. Co-location facilities used to collect performance data are located in CHINA: Guangzhou - China Telecom and HONG KONG: Quarry Bay – CPCNet.

GPN Testing Agent
Gomez tests emulate a standard Web browser across an Internet backbone connection (T1 speed or faster). Data captured and displayed represents the network performance of the transferred data from the perspective of a visitor who is not drawing any page content from a browser or client-side caching server.

Response Time
Response Time metrics reflect the time elapsed while downloading a page (including all embedded objects, Java Scripting and cascading style sheets). Data points from each successful test run are collected from the multiple testing nodes around the country and are aggregated to formulate benchmarks. The resulting metric represents the average time required to execute a single page without factoring in user latency. Although reported test response time metrics are unattainable by real users accessing these applications, the metrics serve as performance standards by which companies can gauge site improvement and measure Internet business effectiveness and customer experience.

Availability
Availability measures the percentage of completed transactions. Availability rates are dependent upon a number of variables including availability of the Web site, ability to process a transaction without error and ability to complete each step of the transaction within a reasonable 60-second time frame. Availability rates do not include server side errors or technical errors incurred due to scripting problems. These errors do occur from time to time and are reflected with a n/a (not available or not applicable) message on the benchmark.