Calculating, Controlling and optimizing

                                                               The page load time 

 

¾ The page load time is considered to be one of the most used and well known
criteria in measuring the Load test failure. The aim of this document is to represent
a detailed description for the calculation process of the page load time and how to
control and optimize it.

¾ Before going forward in describing and explaining the calculation process of the
“Page Load time” we need to be aware of some basic definitions.

• Page request: A page is an upper level request for information made by a Virtual
Client to the system under test (SUT). For example, a Get statement for a URL
retrieves a page.

• Hit: A hit is a request for information made by a Virtual Client to the system under
test (SUT). In other words, an HTTP request. For example, a Get statement for a
URL retrieves a page. The page can include any number of graphics and content
files. Each request for a gif, jpeg, html file, etc., is a single hit.

• Page time (Page Load time): The time it takes to complete a successful upper level
request, in seconds.

• Hit time: The time it takes to complete a successful HTTP request, in seconds.

• Note: The page request is named by the upper level request because there is
another level of requests below it which is the http requests done by each
component in the web page separately.

Author: Ahmed AL Oleemy 1 

 
 Calculation of the page Load time:

Page time (Page Load time) = Connection time + Send time of the upper level
request + Processing time

Connection time : The time taken to open a TCP/IP connection between the
Virtual client and the System under Test (SUT)

Processing time : The total time taken to load the contents of all of the
components of the web page

 
 
 

Calculation of the Hit time:

Hit time = Send time of the http request + Response time + Processing time

Response time : The time taken to transfer the requested data from the server to
  the virtual client

               Processing time : The time taken to represent the transferred data on the web page

Author: Ahmed AL Oleemy 2 

 
Factors affecting the page load time:
There are four main factors that affects the page load time which are:

1) The number of components in the page.

It can be clearly noticed that as the number of components in the page increases,
the page load time will increase as the number of http requests will increase and
accordingly it will take more time from the server to reply on this requests.

2) The type of the components in the page.

Any web page consists of different types of components (Video, Audio, Image,
Text, etc...) and the time taken to retrieve the data of each one of them depends on
its type (Ex: Time to retrieve a Video is more than that to retrieve an image and so
on) so the type of the components in the page affects directly its load time.

3) The number of virtual clients accessing the server.

When there is more than one virtual client accessing the server simultaneously the
multiple processing is a must and accordingly the server’s processor distributes its
processing power to handle all the requests sent to it, so the average time taken to
reply on each request will increase by increasing the number of virtual clients and
accordingly the page load time will increase.

4) The processing power of the server’s processor.

As the processing power of the server’s processor increase its capability of

handling more requests in shorter time increases because the number of
transactions processed per second increases which accordingly affects the page
load time positively as it decrease it.

Author: Ahmed AL Oleemy 3