"Oldak Quill" oldakquill@gmail.com wrote in message news:AANLkTik8sqmaEtWVG8eta+cA49i08rFBrmvicSms+y34@mail.gmail.com...
On 2 August 2010 12:13, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
On 28 July 2010 20:13, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
Seems to me playing the role of the average dumb user, that en.wikipedia.org is one of the rather slow websites of the many websites I browse.
No matter what browser, it takes more seconds from the time I click on a link to the time when the first bytes of the HTTP response start flowing back to me.
Seems facebook is more zippy.
Maybe Mediawiki is not "optimized".
For what it's worth, Alexa.com lists the average load time of the websites they catalogue. I'm not sure what the metrics they use are, and I would guess they hit the squid cache and are in the United States.
Alexa.com list the following average load times as of now:
wikipedia.org: Fast (1.016 Seconds), 74% of sites are slower. facebook.com: Average (1.663 Seconds), 50% of sites are slower.
An addendum to the above message:
According to the Alexa.com help page "Average Load Times: Speed Statistics" (http://www.alexa.com/help/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1042): "The Average Load Time ... [is] based on load times experienced by Alexa users, and measured by the Alexa Toolbar, during their regular web browsing."
So although US browsers might be overrepresented in this sample (I'm just guessing, I have no figures to support this statement), the Alexa sample should include many non-US browsers, assuming that the figure reported by Alexa.com is reflective of its userbase.
And the average Alexa toolbar user is logged in to facebook and using it to see what their friends were up to last night, with masses of personalised content; while the average Alexa toolbar user is a reader seeing the same page as everyone else. We definitely have the theoretical advantage.
--HM