How fast is your page *really* loading?

System

This is a question that is difficult to answer anecdotally. Some power tools seem in order.

This is an easy to deal with, lightweight one -- a Firefox extension that tells you time-to-first-byte and total-load-time for the currently loaded page.

If you're a hardcore customizer, you might want this higher powered extension that requires you to set it up a bit, but will give you more detail on what's going on.

Mike Lane

imageinc wrote:

This is a question that is difficult to answer anecdotally. Some power tools seem in order.

This is an easy to deal with, lightweight one -- a Firefox extension that tells you time-to-first-byte and total-load-time for the currently loaded page.

If you're a hardcore customizer, you might want this higher powered extension that requires you to set it up a bit, but will give you more detail on what's going on.

fasterfox has a page load time utility as well.

System

I saw Fasterfox, yes, but pre-load utilities give me hives, on several levels... and they also interact negatively (or can) with exactly what we're talking about trying to do: find out how fast it works.

If we change what "works" means, then we can't tell.

If everyone installs lori, and quotes times in seconds, it's much easier to get a portable baseline, I would think.

Andy

imageinc wrote:

I saw Fasterfox, yes, but pre-load utilities give me hives, on several levels... and they also interact negatively (or can) with exactly what we're talking about trying to do: find out how fast it works.

If we change what "works" means, then we can't tell.

If everyone installs lori, and quotes times in seconds, it's much easier to get a portable baseline, I would think.

Seems to me, to be so many variables in the mix here

* each person's ISP
* type of internet connection?
* their computer
* the browser used
* the state of the connection between them and SmugMug at the moment

System

Andy wrote:

Seems to me, to be so many variables in the mix here

* each person's ISP
* type of internet connection?
* their computer
* the browser used
* the state of the connection between them and SmugMug at the moment

Precisely so. That's exactly the reason I think everyone would find it useful to be able to put a number on "how fast is the page really loading?"

*Why* it's loading crappy is pretty much secondary to *whether* it's loading crappy or not, and it's hard to characterize that unless you have a number.

Andy

imageinc wrote:

Precisely so. That's exactly the reason I think everyone would find it useful to be able to put a number on "how fast is the page really loading?"

*Why* it's loading crappy is pretty much secondary to *whether* it's loading crappy or not, and it's hard to characterize that unless you have a number.

Sounds great - and for anyone who has difficulties, or slowness - we'd love to help diagnose it So, a traceroute is really helpful, too.

devbobo

you can also use the 'Net' tab on Firebug, which gives you load times for everything: images, scripts, css, etc