Skip to main content

Establishing an Internet Performance Benchmark

A minimum Internet Performance Bar exists that, if met, should deliver top-tier website performance, regardless of industry, according to the 2019 Digital Experience Performance Benchmark Report, from ThousandEyes, a comparative analysis of web, infrastructure and network performance metrics from the top 20 US digital retail, travel and media websites.

The research measured Internet, network, server and experience metrics every 10 minutes for 60 days across 36 major metros across the US In total, over 300M unique measurements were collected and analyzed

Findings from the research include:

Each industry displays unique performance patterns

The three measured industries (retail, media and entertainment, and travel and hospitality) display distinct performance cohort behaviors that differ from each other. For example, top retail sites fall into two distinct clusters of HTTP response times along a mostly uniform range of network latency, while media and entertainment sites saw a more uniform range of HTTP response times but with two distinct clusters of network latency.

Significant performance variations exist

Significant performance variations exist, despite perceived market maturity. Performance variations across CDN providers, ISPs and geographies exist even in the highly mature US market. This makes real-time operational visibility from a variety of geographical and Internet user vantage points important so businesses can keep a real-time eye on unexpected performance blockers.

Delivering strong DNS, network and HTTP response time performance will help

Focusing on delivering strong DNS, network and HTTP response time performance will help most companies deliver top-tier digital experiences.

60% of sites with 1st quartile response times delivered DNS and network performance at or better than the median. Delivering near to or better than the median response time highly correlates with strong page load performance. 87% of sites that did so delivered 1st quartile page load times.

Meeting A minimum Internet Performance Bar

A minimum Internet Performance Bar exists that, if met, should deliver top-tier website performance, regardless of industry. Given cross-vertical performance ranges across the gathered metrics, it is recommended that operations teams minimally target DNS time of 25ms, network latency to the CDN edge of 15ms and HTTP response time of 350ms, from all important markets within the US.

"Internet performance is an under-appreciated yet major contributor to digital experience, and in the battle for customer loyalty, every millisecond matters," said Alex Henthorn-Iwane, report author and VP of Product Marketing at ThousandEyes.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Reliability is no longer proven by uptime alone, according to the The SRE Report 2026 from LogicMonitor. In the AI era, it is experienced through speed, consistency, and user trust, and increasingly judged by business impact. As digital services grow more complex and AI systems move into production, traditional monitoring approaches are struggling to keep pace, increasing the need for AI-first observability that spans applications, infrastructure, and the Internet ...

If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

Establishing an Internet Performance Benchmark

A minimum Internet Performance Bar exists that, if met, should deliver top-tier website performance, regardless of industry, according to the 2019 Digital Experience Performance Benchmark Report, from ThousandEyes, a comparative analysis of web, infrastructure and network performance metrics from the top 20 US digital retail, travel and media websites.

The research measured Internet, network, server and experience metrics every 10 minutes for 60 days across 36 major metros across the US In total, over 300M unique measurements were collected and analyzed

Findings from the research include:

Each industry displays unique performance patterns

The three measured industries (retail, media and entertainment, and travel and hospitality) display distinct performance cohort behaviors that differ from each other. For example, top retail sites fall into two distinct clusters of HTTP response times along a mostly uniform range of network latency, while media and entertainment sites saw a more uniform range of HTTP response times but with two distinct clusters of network latency.

Significant performance variations exist

Significant performance variations exist, despite perceived market maturity. Performance variations across CDN providers, ISPs and geographies exist even in the highly mature US market. This makes real-time operational visibility from a variety of geographical and Internet user vantage points important so businesses can keep a real-time eye on unexpected performance blockers.

Delivering strong DNS, network and HTTP response time performance will help

Focusing on delivering strong DNS, network and HTTP response time performance will help most companies deliver top-tier digital experiences.

60% of sites with 1st quartile response times delivered DNS and network performance at or better than the median. Delivering near to or better than the median response time highly correlates with strong page load performance. 87% of sites that did so delivered 1st quartile page load times.

Meeting A minimum Internet Performance Bar

A minimum Internet Performance Bar exists that, if met, should deliver top-tier website performance, regardless of industry. Given cross-vertical performance ranges across the gathered metrics, it is recommended that operations teams minimally target DNS time of 25ms, network latency to the CDN edge of 15ms and HTTP response time of 350ms, from all important markets within the US.

"Internet performance is an under-appreciated yet major contributor to digital experience, and in the battle for customer loyalty, every millisecond matters," said Alex Henthorn-Iwane, report author and VP of Product Marketing at ThousandEyes.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Reliability is no longer proven by uptime alone, according to the The SRE Report 2026 from LogicMonitor. In the AI era, it is experienced through speed, consistency, and user trust, and increasingly judged by business impact. As digital services grow more complex and AI systems move into production, traditional monitoring approaches are struggling to keep pace, increasing the need for AI-first observability that spans applications, infrastructure, and the Internet ...

If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...