Measure Response Time

Question

How do I measure a site response time from the console?

Answer 1

Assuming a UNIX system, a simple, artificial way would be:

time lynx http -source -dump http://google.com/ > /dev/null

This will show how long lynx takes to do name lookups, connect to the server, wait for your server and perform the download of data.

Real browsers can cache part of your website, but they also need to render the content, so if your concern is the actual user experience, you don't want to use the lynx method.

Answer 2

Question is very vague. One answer would be to

• install firebug and Google Pagespeed on firefox.

Another answer would be:

• go spend a 6 figure sum installing Nework and Client Vantage with HTTP protocol decodes and look at the graphs

Another answer would be

• capture the traffic with TCPdump

Another answer would be

• reconfigure apache to write %D in the log files

There are hundreds more.

And that's based on lots of assumptions about what you want to measure.

Go read this, this, this and this

Answer 3

The question is a bit vague, but you have several ways to do so

• Use smokeping to see the box behaviour and also outside reach, quite useful
• Add statistics to apache or your preferred web server to see average serving time of your web pages
• Check also Load average, that'll give you a good hint too

Also you can use external free sites to check your server like http://www.changedetect.com/ or use Google Analytics as well

Answer 4

In addition to all other good suggestions:

Web application transaction performance can be measured with the open source iMacros for Firefox addon from the command line.