Recording website load times?

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.

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

Any tips from the testing community would be awesome.

Upvotes: 2

Answers (7)

vaskin

Reputation: 513

You will want to use an external service for this. The service may have a Firefox plugin you can use, but ultimately you want to have your queries run from multiple controlled testing servers that are built to test your load in isolation from other variables.

Upvotes: 0

Bitsplitter

Reputation: 980

pingdom.com has a freemium solution for this. One site for free, more sites will cost you.

Upvotes: 0

brianc

Reputation: 1629

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

Upvotes: 0

Brad

Reputation: 163468

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.

Upvotes: 0

Marm0t

Reputation: 931

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.

Upvotes: 0