Tool for Testing Web Page Download Time

[zmroberts]

Does anyone have any knowledge of software or other realistic tools (besides a stopwatch) for testing download time of web pages? My specific purpose is to improve page download speed for low bandwidth users but I would like a decent testing tool.

Thanks

[mcjohnson]

try xat dot com for a downloadable tool, or websiteoptimization dot com for a web based tool.

[Matt Probert]

Namo Web editor includes such a facility.

Matt

[zmroberts]

I'll check those out... any other tools... price is not an issue... but free would be fantastic. What about QALoad?

[zmroberts]

anybody else have any ideas on this?

[jezra]

I use "Sloppy - the slow proxy". It doesn't show the time it will take to download a webpage. It does however emulate the browsing experience of someone with a slow connection. There is something depressing about browsing the web through the eyes of a user with a 28k modem.

[texasville]

google it and you will get a couple of seo sites that time it for you. I use frontpage generally and it hits it pretty close on 56k.

[2by4]

Oh, without any doubt, if I want to test my sites download time over a dialup connection, I use a modem and a dialup connection. I'm not being sarcastic, if you want to test your site's performance over dialup, then test it by using dialup, modems cost like $20, you never need a new one, you can just use a friend's access phone number, or pay a few dollars a month to get a cut rate dialup ISP.

As a rough figure however, you will always know how it performs, dialup speed maxes at about 5 kB per second, 6 if it's a great connection, top level.

So simply go to the webpage, save it using save all in firefox, don't use MSIE, it adds a bunch of code when you save pages, it will put it all the page elements in a folder, then right click on the whole page folder, make a new one for each test, select properties, it will show you how many kB the folder is. Divide by 5, that's how many seconds it takes to download.

However, that won't show you for example what an image heavy page actually looks like as it loads [very very bad], especially graphically based nav bars, those are really bad because they contain way too many discreet images.

[zmroberts]

great thanks for the suggestions... I agree to truly test dial up would make sense to actually test it on a dial up.

[2by4]

This question comes up all the time, and each time people have all these really nice suggestions on how to emulate dialup performance, as if dialup were this really difficult, time consuming, expensive thing to install on your computer, so you need to pay for a service or product that will emulate it.

But dialup, I mean, a modem + an isp phone number + username and password, you don't even need to have a dialup account, just use a friend's connection information for testing. Why emulate something that is so easy and standard to do? Makes no sense to me at all. Plus those emulators don't actually work like dialup, all they do is throttle the bandwidth to some predetermined speed, real dialup has these unpredictable connection speeds, fluctuations, etc, that's what you actually want to see.

[zmroberts]

2b4... do you know where I can find any documentation or web resources (besides this posting) that state that dialup speeds are maxed out at about 5-6 kb/s.

Thanks

[2by4]

They max out at 48 kbit per second last I checked, but you very rarely get that, 40 is more normal. Also, because of how modem phone banks work, the more dialup users are connecting, the less speed you get when you make the connection, although a connection speed doesn't tend to change that much once it's created.

The amount of data they can move over a standard phone line is I believe a technical restriction, it's physically how much you can move an analog signal over a standard twisted pair copper wire set.

This hasn't changed at all for I think 5 years, they maxed out at a theoretical 56 kbit rate, it's never risen since they hit that point, so I assume it's a technical restriction, earlier they thought they could only get 28kbit, but I guess they figured out some tricks to make it faster.

Here's one article [windowsnetworking.com] that sort of explains it, with the numbers, but I haven't really followed this for years since it hasn't changed for years.

The wide variations in connection speeds, times of day, how many subscribers are using the modem banks, lots of stuff, is why it's pretty pointless trying to emulate this, you want to see how it really works on a real connection.

In fact, I'd recommend anyone who hasn't surfed recently using a modem do it for a day or two now and then, it will make you significantly rethink how you code your websites, and how you treat images.