What's this 'speed' thing in Alexa?

...and how on earth is it calculated?

[ronin]

Okay, I know we should all take Alexa data with a pinch of salt, because it will only be accurate when 99% of the browsing population have installed the Alexa toolbar... but I notice that in the most recent update, my site's speed has been demoted to the 3rd percentile.

What?

I write my site using trimmed, hand-written html and stylesheets which take full advantage of CSS shortcuts and inheritance. I take pride in how fast the site is and how quickly the pages fire up in all the main browsers.

So how on earth do they calculate the speed?

Does anyone know?

[marcs]

Think they mean actual download speed of the files/pages, not rendering speed.

[sidyadav]

Yep, its the speed of the whole page loading so for example, if you have a 2KB page and a 200KB image, it will calculate the speed when the image fully loads. And its ia_archiver who calculates it.

Sid