Free Chrome Extension Page Load Time
Free Chrome Web Page Load Time Extension
You would think measuring how long it takes for a web page to load would be a trivial topic. Unfortunately this can be anything but simple and I’m sure those of you who tried can attest to that.
Loading a webpage involves quite a bit of network and coding interaction to present the user with a webpage within a reasonable time.
When I was teaching an onsite class, someone asked if we can use their intranet portal in our live exercises. When I asked why he said that everyone complains about how long it takes to load the main page and blames the network. We started a Wireshark capture (since it was a Wireshark Class) and noticed that it took the webpage over 1 minute to completely load with many pauses along the way. I asked where the server was located and they said, “one floor down in the datacenter”. I then asked if there are any other applications or websites on that server and they said, “yes”. So right there we realized it can’t be the network or the physical server. When we reviewed the trace we determined that there were 9 images that were 8 – 10 MB each. Then we dug a bit deeper and found a lot of php coding errors as well as broken links. In the end it was just a poorly designed page.
I want to walk you through some of the high level aspects of loading a webpage:
1. You enter www.networkcomputing into your browser address bar.
2. Your computer needs to use ARP to resolve its router IP address to a MAC address
3. Resolve the domain name to an ip address
4. Load the main web page and process any php, CSS or other commands
5. As the page loads there will be references to other domain names
6. Resolve other domain names
7. Rinse and repeat ;)
Trying to develop a consistent way to measure the load time can be tricky at best. I will walk you through a manual methodology so you clearly see the steps involved. Understanding the methodology is helpful to use when reviewing how you may be performing this same task.
This is my methodology used from a Microsoft client computer:
1. I installed the Chrome Page Load Time extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/de...
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