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Who's Fast?

August 1, 2002

More and more people are complaining - and cable/DSL companies are reminding them - of how slow dial-up connections can be. But how slow - or how fast - are the world's most trafficked web sites anyway?

Radsoft conducted an informal study over a two-week period of twenty-nine of the world's most trafficked web sites, using in-house software to calibrate full load times to the millisecond. The tables that follow list the averages, sorted both alphabetically and by results.

There are some surprises here, to be sure. Perhaps most surprising is the fact that Radsoft was not at the top of the list, but finished only in third place.

The BBC news site, which has had a reputation of being extremely slow, finished in a comfortable fifth place, ahead of all the other news sites tested. Sun was, as expected, faster than its rival Microsoft, while most of the sites tested finished at an average of less than half a minute.

Security sites Infoworld and especially Symantec's recent acquisition Security Focus Online performed deplorably, with the latter having an average load time of nearly three times the median - almost a minute and a half.

Sorted alphabetically
aol.com 0:24.940
att.com0:28.290
comcast.net0:32.680
digex.com0:56.730
earthlink.net0:31.420
foundstone.com0:19.610
geocities.com0:25.100
guardian.co.uk0:36.420
incidents.org0:25.930
infoworld.com0:49.430
microsoft.com0:38.170
msnbc.com0:34.320
my.yahoo.com0:20.100
news.bbc.co.uk0:19.440
news.com0:37.460
nytimes.com0:38.060
radsoft.net0:14.550
reuters.com0:25.710
securityfocus.com1:26.120
sprint.com0:22.910
sun.com 0:17.130
w3c.org0:13.790
washingtonpost.com0:26.040
whitehouse.gov0:29.880
wsj.com0:30.210
www.arin.net0:28.400
www.royal.gov.uk0:30.540
www.uu.net0:13.620
zd.net0:33.060
 Sorted by results
www.uu.net 0:13.620
w3c.org0:13.790
radsoft.net0:14.550
sun.com 0:17.130
news.bbc.co.uk0:19.440
foundstone.com0:19.610
my.yahoo.com0:20.100
sprint.com0:22.910
aol.com0:24.940
geocities.com0:25.100
reuters.com0:25.710
incidents.org0:25.930
washingtonpost.com0:26.040
att.com0:28.290
www.arin.net0:28.400
whitehouse.gov0:29.880
wsj.com0:30.210
www.royal.gov.uk0:30.540
earthlink.net0:31.420
comcast.net0:32.680
zd.net0:33.060
msnbc.com0:34.320
guardian.co.uk0:36.420
news.com0:37.460
nytimes.com0:38.060
microsoft.com0:38.170
infoworld.com0:49.430
digex.com0:56.730
securityfocus.com1:26.120

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