To get a sense for the likelihood that a request would take a long
time to start receiving data, we collected 1000 random URLs from
AltaVista [1] and timed their responses. This study
differs somewhat from Viles and French [20], who
studied the availability of
random HTTP servers and the time to connect to
them; here we are
seeing how long it takes to collect the first data from a WWW page.
Figure 5 shows the results of this experiment,
based on the 722 URLs that returned data within the first minute.
We found
that about a third of pages responded within a second, assuming
they responded at all, and half responded within about 1.6s. However,
it takes 5s to cover 
of the pages and
10% took 10-30s or more for the first
data to arrive. As more pages on the WWW are dynamically
generated, we expect the fraction of pages with sluggish response to
increase.
Figure 5: Distribution of response times to receive first data, based
on a sampling of 722 URLs. Roughly
of the sample received data within a second, and
received data within 5 seconds.
