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| Home » Student Projects » Prabhat Bhardwaj |
Performance Evaluation of Websites Using Interface Agents
Student: Prabhat Bhardwaj
Supervisor: Xue Li
Category: Engineering Thesis Project - Computer Systems
Website Performance Evaluation is a process by which we can determine the speed of a website and hence determine the quality of a website. The purpose of my research is to develop an Interface Agent (IA) that evaluates a websites performance using comparative analysis.
An interface agent is a Semi Intelligent system that assists users with daily computer based tasks. In this thesis an Interface Agent was designed for website developers using Visual Basic 6.0. It allows the user to specify the website they want to evaluate, along with the category their website falls in. The IA then accesses the websites for that category from the database and sends it to the server. The server sends the retrieval time for each website. Finally the IA performs a comparison test and ranks the specified website.
There were three major issues faced while evaluating a website’s performance. They were Quantifying download time, performance comparison of Same System Different Sites and performance comparison of Same Site Different Systems. To resolve the above issues the following solutions were implemented. Comparative Analysis algorithm was used to counter the problem of Quantifying download time. The Same System Different Sites problem was overcome by dividing the websites into categories that are specified by the user. Therefore a websites performance is measured with similar websites. Finally the Same Site Different Systems problem is resolved by getting the comparative data each time on the testing site’s computer system.
The IA developed, successfully performs a comparison test and ranks the test website relative to other websites. A significant advantage of using an IA is that it eliminates the users task of getting comparison data. It allows the user to simply specify their test website and the IA takes care of measuring download times for websites in the database.