Explanation of Pingdom Results

Question

Hi,

I'm trying to optimize my page load times, and I'm using Pingdom to test the site response times. However, I'm not exactly sure what the various components of the "time bar" mean.

Example link: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/?url=http://neosmart.net/forums//&id=2230361

According to them, the portion of the bar that is yellow is the time between "start" and "connect" and the portion of the bar that is green is the time between "connect" and "first byte" with the blue section being the actual transfer time (time between "first byte" and "last byte").

If I'm trying to the first two (which take very long in my case), what's the recommended course of action?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I contacted Pingdom Support, this was the reply I received:

Hi Mahmoud,

Thank you for contacting us.

Your assumptions are indeed mostly correct: the yellow part is the time it takes to resolve the hostname and similar (before the connection is initiated to the web server), the green part is connecting to the web server, and the blue part is the time it takes to retrieve the content from the webserver.

If you have any more questions, please let us know.

Best Regards,

Aron Lander Pingdom
www.pingdom.com