The following white paper seeks to examine performance characteristics in a server-based computing environment from a user experience perspective. Specifically addressing how responsive an environment is to the demands of the user, be that relating to application start-up, data access or general application use.

This paper will introduce the concept of ‘time-to-wait’; namely the length of time a user will wait for a system to respond to a particular command. Research has been conducted by AppSense to determine what are acceptable values for ‘time-to-wait’ and what factors can affect this value.