Keynote's Top Ten ``Gift List'' for Holiday Web Site Performance: How to Prepare E-Commerce Sites for the Holiday Shopping Rush.

SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 8, 1999--

How Sites Can Deliver Performance and Reliability to Online Customers

Keynote (Nasdaq:KEYN), the Internet Performance Authority(TM), Wednesday announced the Top Ten actions e-tailers can take to prepare their Web sites for the heavy holiday shopping season in order to optimize performance and reliability for online shoppers and avoid disastrous public failures.

Keynote's "gift list" for e-commerce Web-site performance is based on the company's expertise in providing measurement, diagnostic and consulting services to over 500 leading e-commerce Web sites and hosting companies.

"With 400 Internet shopping hours to Christmas and still a lot of online shopping ahead of us, there are still actions e-tailers can take to make improvements," said Lloyd Taylor, vice president of Operations at Keynote and author of the Top Ten list. "However, e-commerce sites can take these steps at any time of the year to help assure maximum performance and availability. And, they have plenty of time to prepare for next year's holiday shopping season."

Top Ten actions to prepare your Web site for the Christmas rush:

1. Measure, measure, measure -- You don't really know how well your site is performing for your customers unless you measure and compare it against other sites. Measure it for your customers shopping from home and from work. Just because your site may perform well for shoppers on high-speed connections at work does not mean it performs comparably well for shoppers on slower connections at home. Measurements will show you where you can make improvements: at the server, in the design of the site, or working with your ISP or hosting provider to remove performance bottlenecks.

2. Simplify -- Reduce the number of objects on your Web pages. The more objects on a Web page, the longer it takes to download. Today's most-popular Web browsers download only two to four objects at a time. The best possible design for speed uses a maximum of four objects.

3. Make it smaller -- The larger the size of the Web page, the worse the performance, especially for users on 56-Kbps dial-up modems who can download no faster than 5,000 characters per second even under ideal Internet conditions.

4. Turn off reverse DNS lookups at your server -- Reverse DNS lookups slow down the initial connection to your Web site.

5. Check your bandwidth usage, and make sure that there is plenty of extra capacity.

6. Make sure your servers have enough memory and are configured to use it. 512 megabytes of RAM is the recommended minimum.

7. Check your back end -- Test the whole system, not just the front-end servers. Many companies spend a lot of time tuning their Web servers but don't pay enough attention to the database and application servers that stand behind their e-commerce system. Test the system under load to make sure it can process transactions without failures.

8. Install parallel servers behind a load balancer.

9. Use a content distribution service like Sandpiper (Nasdaq:ISLD) or Akamai (Nasdaq:AKAM).

10. Load Test -- You don't really know how your system will perform until you test it ahead of time. It's not uncommon for a company to design a Web site believing it will withstand hundreds of thousands of users, and then to find out that it crashes at only 100. Put a test load on it and check it before you roll it out and avoid a public-relations disaster.

About Keynote

Keynote is the largest provider of Internet performance measurement, diagnostic and consulting services to companies that operate e-commerce Web sites. The company markets Keynote Perspective(TM) and Keynote Lifeline(TM), global real-time services that measure, assure and improve the Quality of Service of e-commerce Web sites around the world. The company captures over 12 million performance measurements daily using Keynote's global infrastructure of over 220 measurement computers connected to the major Internet backbones in over 90 statistically selected Internet access locations across 43 metropolitan areas worldwide. Internet performance and availability data are collected at Keynote's sophisticated operations center and are instantly available to customers through any Web browser.

Keynote customers include over 500 leading e-commerce Web sites and hosting companies including AdForce (Nasdaq:ADFC), Amazon.com (Nasdaq:AMZN), CDNow (Nasdaq:CDNW), Compaq Computer (NYSE:CPQ), Cisco Systems (Nasdaq:CSCO), Dell Computer (Nasdaq:DELL), Digex (Nasdaq:DIGX), DoubleClick (Nasdaq:DCLK), Exodus Communications (Nasdaq:EXDS), Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT), National Semiconductor (NYSE:NSM), and SABRE Holdings (NYSE:TSG).

For further information about Keynote, visit the Keynote Web site at http://www.keynote.com or contact the company at Keynote Systems Inc., 2855 Campus Drive, San Mateo, Calif., 94403, telephone [phone], fax [phone], e-mail [e-mail].

Keynote, Perspective(TM) , Lifeline(TM) , and The Internet Performance Authority(TM) are trademarks of Keynote Systems Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.