I've been optimizing my site's performance by tuning the server-side code and watching how it affects the amount of time Firefox reports as "Waiting". It seems like the "Transferring" time would be optimized by reducing the size of the HTML to download. What about "Looking up" and "Connecting"?
I noticed that if I'm doing a lot of clicking around there is pretty much no time spent with either of those, but if I work on something and then come back to the browser after a bit, Firefox can really spend some time there. I'd imagine that is apache's area. What can I do to minimize the time needed to look up and connect?
I'm wondering how you're getting any sort of concrete numbers out of anything. If you're eyeballing Firefox and going by feel it's going to be hard for you see where the problem is or if there is one. If it were me, I'd do something like the following:
1. Add a "time to render page" into your test page. I normally see this in php pages, but assume it's not hard to do. This should give you some sort of idea of how complicated the page was to put together o the server side.
2. use curl or other command line tool to pull the page. preferably using the time command. Do this and write times to a file every 30 seconds.
3. Write a script to check server load and record it to a file every 30 secs.
4. send 10 pings or so to the server from the client and record times to a file every 30 secs
When you can compare server load to time for the server to render page to time to download the page to ping times you will have interesting data. Otherwise you have no idea if it's the connection, the server or the client.
I'm not sure how well most of the what I listed would work in actually implementation, but the idea of getting things put into tools that you can measure in milliseconds is never bad.
kashani
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