Recording website load times?

Question

I am trying to record the time it takes to load my website on an average (say 10 runs) from various locations in the world. For this, I was thinking of using a list of proxies to achieve this and am not sure this is the perfect way of doing this.

1. Is there a Firefox add-on that lets me time this perhaps using Firebug itself?
2. Is there an alternate way of running this test?

Any tips from the testing community would be awesome.

Answer 1

Try Google Page Speed for Firefox.

Answer 2

• "Net" tab in Firebug
• Google PageSpeed
• Yahoo YSlow

You can also add a snippet of JavaScript to your pages and your clients can report their page render speed http://blog.yottaa.com/2010/10/how-to-measure-page-load-time-with-google-analytics/

Answer 3

I did timings using the unix/linux command 'wget' (or 'curl'). What I would do was:

time wget 'hxxp://mycoolwebsite.com' > index.html
time curl 'hxxp://mycoolwebsite.com' > index.html

I did this for a mostly text-based web server that performed an action in php before returning a value. There are options to specify if you get the images too ( i think).

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

I couldn't recommend Fiddler more. While it doesn't check performance "around the world", it does make guesses based on typical latency. Plus, you get the actual load time (don't confuse this with render time) as done in an actual browser. Lots of web-based tools will download all the files for your page, but due to scripting and other things, they will miss tons. Fiddler catches everything.

Answer 5

there is also internetsupervision, though I'm not sure how accurate it really is.