Measuring complete website loading time

acidmax has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Fellow monks,

I work as a system administrator, and we have a couple of DSL modems which often overload (cannot change them) and website loading becomes slow.

I need to time a complete test-load of a website with all the requests - images, js, flash objects - just like a web browser. HTTP::WebTest, the only module which seems to be available for that doesn't parse source and only processes the HTML as text.

Ideas are welcome.

Regards,
Todor

Comment on Measuring complete website loading time

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Re: Measuring complete website loading time by Fletch (Bishop) on Jan 12, 2009 at 13:52 UTC
Not a Perl solution, but there are Firefox addons such as YSlow or the Firebug "Net" tab which show timing information. The cake is a lie. The cake is a lie. The cake is a lie.	[reply]
Re: Measuring complete website loading time by JavaFan (Canon) on Jan 12, 2009 at 13:33 UTC
The easy parts are easy. You can use 'wget' to get the file, frames and associated images. It's easily timed how long that takes. But webbrowsers also execute javascript. Which may lead to new downloads. It also may load plugins, which may do their own downloads. Short from remotedly controlling a browser, that's going to be hard to simulate. Finally, browser may download things depending on user interaction - mouse movement for instance.	[reply]
Re: Measuring complete website loading time by merlyn (Sage) on Jan 12, 2009 at 15:29 UTC
I did a column on that, although it was back in 2001 when I was talking about dialup instead of DSL. :) Should be a useful starting place. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker	[reply]
Re^2: Measuring complete website loading time by acidmax (Sexton) on Jan 15, 2009 at 16:36 UTC
Thanks! This is exactly what i had in mind.	[reply]