[RESOLVED] PHP timer: (x) seconds to render page...

Rodney_H_

This is probably a stupid question, but I honestly don't know... So...

You know those pages with the timers built into them?

At the bottom of the page they say something like:

"Page executed in: .0265 seconds"

Or...

"Page load time: .0265 secs."

These things got me thinking:

What IS an acceptable time a page should render in?

What is TOO much time?

abc123

I suppose it would depend on what you are doing. People are very impatient and would not wait more than a few seconds for a result.

Personally if I was using Google and it took around 10 seconds I'd be using another search engine.

Weedpacket

Well those timers are pretty pointless, because they don't take not of network round-trip times between the user initiating a request, the client actually getting around to making the request, the request reaching the server .... the response getting back to the client, and the client rendering it.

People are prepared to wait longer if something is visibly happening; a completely blank page for more than three or four seconds starts to get irritating, but if something (ideally, the most important part of the page) is coming up, it gives them something to look at while other bits load. Pages that start off with eight or nine separate connections to various ad servers (the loads on which can really hurt their response times) are an immediate turn-off.

Rodney_H_

Thanks, Weedpacket.

I appreciate your well-thought response.

Yeah, I see what you mean now. I am working on a project and I was reading the sleep() function user comments on PHP.net when I noticed all the timer scripts. While putting the project together, it was fun to time out the pages to see how quickly they ran on Localhost. I guess if everything locally runs at a fraction of a second then I should be OK when I get to the production server.

I was just curious if there was an actual benchmark out there.

Like in the old, old days of web-design, people used to say a whole page should weigh in at less than 100KB, graphics et al.... LoL...

Have a nice holiday Weekend, all.

-Rod

Weedpacket

A hundred? Hah! I remember when 30.7kB in toto was your ceiling!

Actually, now that I write that I seem to remember that it actually had a derivation (i.e., it's not just random). Please wait ......

Ah; it would take 10 seconds to download that amount of data down a 24kbps pipe (not counting TCP/IP overhead): people weren't going to wait ten seconds.

You can get a feel for how old that derivation is by looking at that bandwidth: speeds are typically much higher now but that's offset by people's patience being somewhat less (and dropping).

Unless they're somewhere out in the back of beyond; I remember learning of one email conversation with a route that included a truck shuttling back and forth 200km each way through the backblocks of Kenya.

Me? Holiday? Not for another couple of months, yet: Labour Day.