Current Falcon version is 1.0 Falcon help document Falcon application is used to measure an Internet server reliability. Falcon works by implementing an automated ping service which transits connections between a local and a remote computer. Tests are measured by the software application and reported to the console. Optionally, tests can be uploaded to a public database maintained by Caracolix Media for www sharing. Tests can be accomplished only by site owners or people that has writing access rights to the website's root directory. Falcon cannot be used to attack websites by other means. Falcon local software console runs under Windows OS. No other software is required nor necessary. Configuring Falcon Click on Menu to open the menu options panel. Select Configure Enter the URL of each of your sites to test and press Add to add them to the permanent list. Only the sites listed on the list will be monitored. If you don't want to monitor one of the sites just click on that site and press Del. You can leave the site on the input box just in case you want to add it back later. Samples: Each request Falcon does to your monitored site. By default Falcon does 1 request which generally is enough to check if the site is alive without overflowing the connections unnecessarily. Falcon will automatically re-ping the site if the first ping fails or is too high. Delay: Time to wait between pings to the same site. Default is 60 seconds. Faster pings (shorter delay between pings) is not recommended for accurate results because most web servers will cache the page you requested and will keep it in memory for a certain amount of seconds so if your next egg request comes shortly after, then the server still has it cached and will deliver it very fast giving you a false reading. You may, however, use that result to know the round-trip time of the ping just like you would do with a regular ping tool. Note: your account at your host may be suspended or canceled if you abuse of it. Excessive ping requests at short delays for an extended length of time is considered to be abuse of service. The electric bulb: The bulb will turn on to show network activity. Warnings: You can set 2 warnings. If left as default a Blue warning will display for pings of 1 or more seconds and a Red warning for pings over 20 seconds. [At] Restart, Save, Stop: When the "At" time is reached Falcon can save the log and/or clear the display and restart if the appropriate option is check-marked. Keep last: Set a number here and when the Restart works it will keep the last "n" entries. Press Menu and select Configure again to hide the configuration screen and return to the main screen. There is one more thing you need to do for Falcon to work.
This simple file is what falcon will request to download from the website. It is a 3 byte file which will not waste bandwidth. Falcon can make eggs by selecting "Hatching" from the menu Falcon Reports: Falcon will show several reports on screen immediately after analyzing the ping response. The ping response is also known as pong. Falcon gives the correct measure of time from the time the ping was sent until the egg is received. This response is given in seconds. One of the main differences with other ping tools is that Falcon reports not only the time elapsed while the ping request travels between servers but also the time the target server spends looking for, retrieving and delivering the egg. The sum of all those timings is what really matters because that is what visitors to your site will have to wait (in average) for each page request. Console nomenclature BT: means Best Time . This is the time of the day when the shortest ping was received. WT: means Worst Time: It is the time of the day when the longest ping was received. Avg: Gives an idea of what the regular ping is based on averages from that site. Ref 1: Reference ping * Ref 2: Reference ping * All these times give an idea of how long a visitor has to wait until the server begins delivering the requested document. A ping response is best as its value is closer to 0 zero. A typical response for a server subject to normal load goes between 0 and 0.2 Distance, time of the day, special occasions and other events are some of the factors you will need to consider when analyzing a test. Normally, anything lower than 1 second is very good. Around 1 second is acceptable and above that tends to be a long wait. As the amount of seconds increases, the wait increases and the chances of getting a response time-out increases as well. A time out is seen by a visitor as a non existing document or a website that is no longer there. The amount of results at over 2 seconds over a period of 60 minutes makes a F value. F stands for fail then, f:2 means reliability 2. The best value for f is 0 and 60 the worst. If a test is run for a period of less than 60 minutes the f value is not computed regardless of if there were fail values. For all those tests the f value is 0 and the fc value is ?0 which means it could not be calculated. fc: is F value composite. This value shows the average result in addition to the fail value. A fc:2\3.141 means f value 2 and average ping 3.141 The F value can be 0 even if ping values are higher than 1 but lesser than 2. For those special values the fc value will take the form fc:0\value where value is the larger ping response registered during the test. fc values attempt to be the standard form of measure for host reliability within the Falcon domain. Users of Falcon are free to export this standard elsewhere whenever it be necessary. A fc test must run for exactly 60 minutes with 60 seconds pause between samples. There are two ways to run this test. By selecting fc Test from the menu or by setting the required parameters by hand. fc values which cannot be guaranteed as pure will not be submitted with a report. To get a certified fc value run the test by selecting fc test on the menu. If you stop or attempt to pause this test, Falcon will automatically void it and the test is canceled. Extremely high ping values are recorded following the previous fc values by the following rule. If a single value larger than 20 seconds appeared then a minus sign precedes the value recorded. If more than a single value appears then a plus sign precedes the average of all values higher than 20 seconds. fc: 2\3.141+34 The sample from above tell us the average ping is 3.141 and there were 2 pongs over 1 second. It recorded more than 1 very high pong which yielded an average result of 34 seconds. A server which yields results like that is somehow common although undesirable. Reference Pings For a proper judgment of the remote host reliability it is fundamental to have a way to compare ping results between a variety of sources. In this way you can make sure the results (good or bad) are due to the remote server efficiency and not to your computer connection to the Internet or affected by other bandwidth intensive applications you may run locally. Reference pings let you compare the average lag from your site(s) with two reference pings supplied by our servers. Ref 1 and Ref 2 boxes display the reference pings. The reference information is retrieved at certain times chosen by the program depending in a variety of factors such as the amount of failed pongs or the timing of current pings. We provide two reference servers which work in real time with an unknown factor of load. This load makes the results more valuable since those values are in the same category of the host you are testing. One of our servers is located in Europe and the other in USA. The far apart difference in the location of the servers improves widely the power of your measurements. *Reference pings is an optional service which also includes upload and report sharing service. Those services are available for a small annual fee. For more information and to subscribe visit Falcon website. Report Sharing There are a few reasons to share your reports 1. To let people know with real numbers how good or bad a hosting service provider is. You also will benefit by having a permanent online resource to remember a service you already used. Specially good if you were not satisfied by it. 2. As you share, others will also share and you may benefit from other users experiences. 3. For a truly unbiased factual source. note: Your website name or address will not show on the report. Only the company that hosts your website will be shown. Paid subscriptions make possible the continuity of our service. Please support Falcon. Falcon Reports When you select Submit Report, Falcon will try to find out the name of your website's host and then it will format the data and values from the current test for upload to one of the Caracolix-Falcon Internet servers. You can only submit results for tests of 10 or more samples and samples must be separated by a minimum lapse of 60 seconds. You cannot input manually the name of your site host and you will not be able to submit a test in case that Falcon cannot find out that information by itself. You will not be able to submit a test report either if you don't validate the nameservers it gets from a public whois service. In this way we make sure each report is uploaded with your full consent and the name servers are accurate. In case the nameserver retrieved by Falcon does not have the same name than the host you can try to aid Falcon to find it. To do so you must answer NO when the request message "This report is for: " asks if the host is correct. To cancel the search press Cancel on the same screen. Doing so will abort the submit process as well. After a report is submitted you must clear the report screen before being able to submit another report. At this time there is a maximum of 5 submissions a day for each account. This amount may vary in the future. Each submitted report can contain any amount of websites or hosts and there is no other restrictions regarding the quality of the data except that the minimum amount of samples for each site is 10. A paid subscription to falcon service is not necessary for report submission access but members get additional report uploads among other enhancements to the service. Please click here to learn more about subscribing to the service. Your support is appreciated. When you submit a report Falcon will upload the following information: a. The website url being tested. b. The dns information for that website. c. A unique code identification for the computer that submitted the report. d. The timings, pings, pongs, average and other numbers retrieved and calculated from the test. Please do not upload the same test twice. Most certainly the remote server will not save duplicate tests but bandwidth and server processing is wasted when you upload it. Other regulations on the use of the system are found on the terms of service. |
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