Check a Western server's access time and speed for Asian users?

Question

Hello,

I am building a web site targeting users in Europe, South America and Asia. We plan to use a global CDN like Amazon's for static files. However, the CMS itself cannot be easily load-balanced so we still have one central web server.

It would be great if Pingdom, Site24x7 or others offered such tests, but AFAIK they don't. What is a good way to check if our server works well with users in China, India or Brazil?

Please don't suggest using a proxy servers provider, we use that for other things but they are often unreliable for ...reliability tests.

Thank you.

Answer 1

I found a solution.

1. Create a page of about 2MB. You could rename some DSC00123.JPG to index.html. Add the proper «html» header and closing. You may want to wrap the whole body in «CDATA».

2. Save the fake index.html page at the root of your site.

3. Create an account on a monitoring site, like Site24x7. Add your site.

4. On the monitoring site, check all the locations that you want to verify from. Define a frequency like every minute. Check the advanced settings to enable alerts for slow loading pages. Set your limit to 10 seconds.

5. The site will report the loading time for the "home page" from each location.

6. Be amazed how your 2MB page hosted in Germany loads in 44 seconds from Singapore.