Server speed - what matters and how can it be measured?

What does server speed mean?

Server speed refers to the performance and efficiency of a server in handling requests and delivering data. It is a crucial factor for the user experience and the overall performance of a website or online application.

There are different aspects of server speed that influence a server's overall performance:

• Response time (Server Response Time): The time a server needs to respond to a request. A fast response time is essential so that users do not have to wait long for pages or applications to load.
• Load time (Load Time): The time a website requires to fully load. This includes the time from sending the request to the page being completely rendered in the user's browser.
• Throughput (Throughput): The number of requests a server can handle within a given period. Higher throughput means the server can handle more requests simultaneously, which is particularly important for high-traffic websites.
• Latency (Latency): The delay between sending a request and the start of processing by the server. Lower latency leads to faster response times.
• Processing time (Processing Time): The time a server needs to complete a specific task, such as retrieving data from a database or generating a dynamic page.

There are various factors that influence server speed:

• Hardware: The performance of the processor, memory (RAM) and storage drives plays an important role in server speed.
• Software: The operating system, the web server software and other applications on the server, as well as their optimisation, can greatly affect performance.
• Network: The server's network connection, geographic location and network load also have a major impact on load times.

Tip: Learn about Measuring, comparing and optimising CPU performance on a VPS as well as Measuring, comparing and optimising disk performance on a VPS

How can server speed be measured?

Server speed can be measured using various methods and tools, each assessing different aspects of server performance.

Why is server speed so important?

The reason is simple: people are impatient. If you push people's patience to the extreme, this can have very negative and far‑reaching consequences.

The key question: how long is too long? The answer is rather alarming: Google found in a study that the probability of users bouncing from a website increases by 32% after a 3 s wait. After a 5 s wait, the bounce probability increases by 90%.

This primarily applies to page load times — the performance of a website. In other software applications where users wait for a result, the situation is very similar.

Impact on websites

When it comes to page load times, the impact is significant. Longer load times lead to more users bouncing, the willingness to make impulse purchases falls — and overall you lose valuable traffic. This, in turn, affects the website's revenue. Greg Linden from Amazon explains: 100 ms of additional load time led to a 1% loss in revenue.

Another factor not to be underestimated is that Google uses page load times as an important ranking factor. Pages with long load times are therefore ranked lower. As a result the site is found less easily, which again negatively affects the website's revenue.

A very detailed article on page speed and the role that, among others, hosting providers and data centres play in data transmission can be found here.

You can read about the benefits that HTTP/2 and the upcoming HTTP/3 bring for web hosting and response times here.

Effects on other applications

For other applications where users send data to a server and must wait for the result of that transfer (for example, hosted applications on a company network), the effect of poor server performance is very similar: frustrated users and a very poor user experience.

In work processes there is an additional factor: the enforced interruptions caused by waiting for the server's response make a working user's mind wander and concentration is lost. As a result, work processes slow down overall and the individual employee's work rate decreases. If these effects are added across all employees, the company can experience a considerable loss of performance - and significant slowdowns in processing business cases - which can in turn have a very negative impact on the company's market position (customer satisfaction, service levels, competitiveness).

Even for non-work applications, such as games on game servers, user satisfaction quickly declines noticeably when server response times are long.

How can server speed be improved?

The most decisive factor for server speed is and remains, of course, the quality of hosting. This often varies greatly from data centre to data centre - not everywhere offers top performance.

At the data centre itself, the type of hosting also affects the performance and speed of data transfer. If you use a Dedicated Server for compute‑intensive applications, you can generally expect better performance than someone using Shared Web hosting in the same data centre. Before looking for a new hosting provider or moving data centre, you should first examine the performance of the chosen hosting if you want to improve data transfer speeds, reduce load times, or shorten the server's response time.

Improve page speed

To improve page load times on websites, there are a number of measures you can take. Technical optimisation is, alongside content optimisation, the second important part of all on-page optimisation. Optimising load times is an important aspect.

One strategy can be to reduce the amount of required data transfer as far as possible in order to improve performance. This can be achieved, for example, by using lazy-loading strategies or by storing large, frequently used and unchanging data packets (e.g. large images) in the cache. Using various PageSpeed tools can often lead to significant improvements.

Measures on other servers

To reduce data transfer time and shorten application load times you can also:

• use a PHP accelerator
• cache more content (for example by using Varnish Cache)
• take steps to improve database speed (e.g. MySQL)
• increase server RAM
• optimise image files (for example with compression methods such as Gzip or Brotli)
• improve disk speed
• store user profile data locally on each workstation in corporate networks

Depending on the server used and the applications in use, there are always numerous possibilities to improve server performance (sometimes significantly). These options should be utilised as fully as possible — because in the end server speed is truly crucial in almost all areas.

Our article is based on our own experience and research as well as information from external sources.

Article update:
Update 07.06.24: Content updated and expanded.

Sources & further links on the topic:
https://jmeter.apache.org/ (Open Source tool for running load tests)