Hi blue_cowdawg,

I use Mozilla Firefox for web page development, and it has a plug-in caller "Lori" which gives statics for each and every page load, for instance this page from PM before I filled anything in has:

           0.955s   2.767s   40.31KB   2req
[download]

which translates to:

• 1st field: Time to first byte received back to browser from web server. (from click to 1st char received)
• 2nd field: Time to completion. From click to complete display.
• 3rd field: Total size of the page
• 4th field: Number of requests needed to fulfill the page load.

How this helps?

The first field includes the time for my application to run, so it helps me control the internal time of my Perl application. If it's less than a second, Great! If it's 10.s then I may need work! I don't usually care about the 2nd field since that includes the time the browser needs to work. But sometimes it can show you that you have too many nested tables and maybe CSS would be a better solution.

The 3rd and 4th fields can help with determining what can be cached for better performance.

Hope this helps...Ed