It kind of depends on how technical you want to get.
The reflow perf flag measures the time taken to reflow the document.
"reflow" to us means the time it takes to compute the geometric size and
position of the elements on the page. "render" to us means the time to
paint the bits to the screen, having already computed where the bits
should go.
Unless you are writing mozilla code, you probably don't care about the
distinction. We do have several methods of measuring page load time,
which measures the time it takes to fully load a page, including network
download of all resources, layout, etc. This might be the measure you
want. There are a few different ways to measure this, some a which are
run daily as part of our normal testing. If you don't get a detailed
answer here, try posting to netscape.public.mozilla.performance and
someone who runs these tests can tell you how they're done.
As a side note, it would be nice if timing for the rendering system
were included in the daily layout perf tests. This would capture
regressions in 2 important areas: layout asking rendering to paint too
often, and rendering performance itself. Kevin, Marc, what do you
think? Easy to add?
Steve
Ian Holsman wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I'm trying to get winEmbed going so that I can time how long it takes
> for a page to render (display the page above the "fold").
>
> I've seen the MOZ_REFLOW_PERF flag, which is very close, I think, to
> what I am after. Is there a better way to capture the time.
>
>
> The reason why I want to do this, is that the site designers of our
> site, can have a way to measure and track different speed optimizations
> of their pages.
>
> TIA
>
> Ian
>
