User side factor which influence the influence the performance of a website

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred in a fixed amount of time. This is usually measured in MB per second. Therefore available bandwidth is the amount of bandwidth the user has to use. Having a lot of bandwidth is important because the more bandwidth you have the better connection you should get. Also bandwidth is important for I/O devices. An example of an I/O device is a fast disk drive. Bandwidth is important with this device because if there is a slow bandwidth the fast disk drive may hinder its performance.

Download Speed

Download speed is the performance of the internet connection, the speed is measured by MB per second, and this shows the amount of data that is coming into the computer per second. The download speed depends on your ISP and what package you have picked with them. Typically the higher download speed you have the better and faster browsing experience you would get. However even with high download speeds some connections are still slow, this is due to the fact that there are many devices using the same connection at one time, and the bandwidth is being used up by all of them devices.

Bitmap

Bitmap is also known as BMP. It is a digital image that is composed of matrix dots, and is lower quality than vector. For example if you enlarge a bitmap file it may be distorted whilst vectors will remain the same quality. Bitmap has three different types. The first being ‘.bmp, the second being ‘.gif’ and the third being ‘.jpg’

Vector

A vector tool allows you to create your own image. For example in Adobe Fireworks you can use tools and make/edit your own images. Also when you enlarge a vector file it will not lose its quality, but when you enlarge a bitmap file it will lose quality. Vectors have 2 different types of format. These are ‘.pdf’ and ‘.eps’

Mp3

MP3 is a file type used for music files. This file can be read by nearly every device (e.g. phones, consoles, computers, mp3 players) as it is really common because when someone create music they usually use the file type MP3 to create/save it. This file type does not support video unlike AVI. MP3 files use less space than AVI because it is compressed, this saves the users storage space and also makes it easy to edit the file.

AVI

AVI stands for Audio Video Interleaved. It’s a type of file which contains videos, images and sound. This file is widely available on PCs and are starting to come to more and more phones. AVI files are uncompressed meaning that they need a lot more space than mp3, meaning that the quality of the data will be much higher than it would be if the file was compressed.