Objectives of knowledge management

Hosting provider
A service provider that 
manages the server used 
to host an organisation 
website and its 
connection to the Internet 
backbones.
Dial-up connection
Access to the Internet 
via phone lines using 
analogue modems.
Broadband 
connection
Access to the Internet via 
phone lines using a digital 
data transfer mechanism.
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Part 1
Introduction
In 2010 Google introduced speed as a signal into its ranking algorithm, effectively penalis-
ing slower sites by positioning them lower in its listings. The announcement suggested that 
this would only affect 1% of sites (Google, 2010). The announcement also summarised more 
recent research from Akamai which suggested that less than 2 seconds was now an accept-
able download speed for e-commerce site users. With Google taking page download speed 
into account when ranking some particularly slow sites, it’s worth comparing your ‘page 
weight’ or bloat compared to other sites. The average page size is 320 Kb according to this 
compilation: http://code.google.com/speed/articles/web-metrics.html.
Box 3.4
How long before you become impatient?
Usability specialist Jakob Nielsen noted (Nielsen, 1994) that the basic advice for 
response times for human– computer interaction has been about the same for 30 years.
He describes these requirements for response:
● 
0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting 
instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display 
the result.
● 
1.0 second is about the limit for the user’s flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, 
even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is neces-
sary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose 
the feeling of operating directly on the data.
● 
10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user’s attention focussed on the dia-
logue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for 
the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the com-
puter expects to be done. Feedback during the delay is especially important if the 
response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to 
expect.
Speed of access to services is determined by both the speed of the server and the speed of 
the network connection to the server. The speed of the site governs how fast the response 
is to a request for information from the end- user. This will be dependent on the speed of 
the server machine on which the website is hosted and how quickly the server processes the 
information. If there are only a small number of users accessing information on the server, 
then there will not be a noticeable delay on requests for pages. If, however, there are thou-
sands of users requesting information at the same time then there may be a delay and it is 
important that the combination of web server software and hardware can cope. Web server 
software will not greatly affect the speed at which requests are answered. The speed of the 
server is mainly controlled by the amount of primary storage (for example, 1024 Mb RAM 
is faster than 512 Mb RAM) and the speed of the magnetic storage (hard disk). Many of the 
search- engine websites now store all their index data in RAM since this is faster than reading 
data from the hard disk. Companies will pay ISPs according to the capabilities of the server.
An important aspect of hosting selection is whether the server is