Alternative methodologies for measuring internet speed?

Question

When I go to a website to measure my internet speed, I get exactly the results I would expect I should get based on my plan... that is, of course, after I've spent 5 minutes just trying to get the speed test page to load.

Most of the time, I don't really care about having blazing fast download times because I'm not downloading that much data at any one time. I'm far more interested in fast response times... and by response I don't mean just how long a few pings take: I can ping www.speedtest.net from the command prompt in 26ms, but it takes 20 seconds for the page to fully load the first time.

Is there a speed test out there that is a little more practical for the average user who just doesn't want to wait 8 seconds before any page they go to other than google even starts to display? It seems like a test like this should be an integral part of what the average consumer ought to measure their service by.

Answer 1

You could go to www.webpagetest.org and put in a webpage address and have it test how long it took for the contents of the page to display. E.g., if I put in cisco.com, I see it took about 5 1/2 seconds for the page to fully load when that site accessed it for the first time after I submitted it for testing. I can then visit the page from my system using the Google Chrome browser, then right-click on the page and choose "Inspect element". Then I can click on the ">>" that appear to the right of "Elements" in the top of the window pane that opens on the right of the browser window and pick "Network". I can then refresh the page in the browser by hitting the F5 function key. At the bottom of the right-hand pane, I see it took 17.02 seconds for the page to be fully displayed in my browser, so more than 3 times as much time as when the page was accessed by the webpagetest.org site (the system I am using at the moment is experiencing intermittent performance issues).

Keep in mind, though, that slow web page display times are not necessarily the fault of your Internet Service Provider (ISP). They could be due to issues with your system, such as insufficient processor speed or memory to accommodate all the programs that are running on it at the time you are viewing web pages or due to undetected malware that is slowing your system. If you have multiple systems available, do they all experience very slow display of pages when visiting any website?