Need Help In Measuring Web-site Load Time

[miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG 0]

Hey all,
I'm working on a University website and trying to optimize it (performance wise) according to the Yahoo Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website guide.

So far I've to tweak a whole bunch of settings adhering to those rules and achieved pretty good grade for the site (according to YSlow).

What I intend to do now is measure the site load speed from various parts of the world. As there are no conceivable way of doing so sitting in a particular country, I request the board members to help me out a bit with this.

For measuring the load time, unless you're a scriptie, you'll probably have to resort to a plain old stopwatch (which is a part and parcel of all mobile phones these days).

The information I need from you is:

• Approximate load times for the front page (cached and non-cached)
  
• Country you are from
  
• Your internet link speed
  
• Browser make (IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome etc.) and Version
  

Here's what you should do:
Clear your browser Cache - I guess most of you know how to do that. If not write back.
Type the URL: http://www.stamford.edu/- but don't load it yet
Fire up your stopwatch and press Enter to start loading the site
Stop the stopwatch as soon as loading completes and take the reading. That should be your non-cached load time.

Now repeat the process above once more. It should be a whole lot quicker this time as most of the site will be read from the cache. This is the cached load time.

Once you've got both the readings, please post back here along with the information I've requested.

Thanks a million to all the participants in this survey and looking forward to your active response.

Cheers,

m^e

P.S. If you want to get an approximate timings for your own site from a single source autonomously, you should try this new and really cool tool from Pingdom. The service is hosted in Sweden.

[sofiaweb 0]

Approximate load times for the front page,cached (00:00:03),non-cached(00:00:21)# Canada# DSL ,(100.0Mbps),512 kb# Firefox

[yordan 10]

Not very kind test. 0h0m13s50 first load, then blank page, then asked to install flash! Installed it, cleared cache and rebooted, and done the test again.My internet speed is ADSL 512kbits/secCountry : FranceHere are the resultsWindows XP SP2-------------------Internet Explorer 6.0.29.0.1280.spsp_sp2.gdrUncached : 0h0m12.99 sCached : 0h0m07sFirefox 2.0.0.16Uncached : 0h0m09.64s (stanford logo comes last)Cached : 0h0m3.10sWindows Vista---------------Firefox 3.0.10Uncached : 0h0m04.98scached : 0h0m02.96sMicrosoft Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.1883Unached : 0h0m04.86Cached : 0h0m03.26s

[pyost 0]

I can't help but notice the similarity to Stanford Anyway:

 

Non-cached load time: 17sec

Cached load time: 3sec

Country: Serbia

Internet speed: 1536/128kbps

OS and browser: Ubuntu 9.04, Firefox 3.0.13

The non-cached load time is a bit long, I'm sure you can make it shorter

[takerraj 0]

Country : India
ISP speed : 2mbps
O.S : Ubuntu 9.04
Browser : Firefox 3

Cached time : 3.245 secs
Non-cached : 5.812 secs

Used webmonkey stopwatch script to check the precise load time. Webmonkey stopwatch script can be found here.

[wutske 0]

First thing I'd like to say, in Opera, when I browse to http://www.stamford.edu/, I get a "The page you are looking for wasn't found on our server.", in Firefox the page redirects to http://www.stamford.edu/en (I used this link for both FF and Opera).

 

openSuse 11.0 with Opera 9.64

Non-Cached: 4s066

Cached: 2s586

 

openSuse 11.0 with Firefox 3.5.1

Non-cached: 7s124

Cached: 2s117

 

 

Country: Belgium

Your internet link speed: 4Mbps

 

 

ps. you might check the "page not found" page, the banner image is takes a while to load, you might want to use jpg which has much better compression ratios for images.