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Comment by compumike | Hacker News Reader

This post encouraged me to take a look at Google Webmaster Tools -> Labs -> Site Performance for my site. It says 4.3 seconds average load time, "slower than 63% of all sites", and the graph since November shows tremendous variability, varying between 2-6 seconds. I don't understand where 4.3 seconds comes from (even with an empty cache, it's maybe 1.6 seconds to onLoad), unless they're using some old ISDN line or something. And I don't know where the variability over time is coming from, with a lightly loaded server that hasn't changed much in that time.

Is anyone else having similar weirdness with their Site Performance graphs?

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Do you have a lot of visitors? I have my webmaster tools interface in Swedish, but it is telling me that my 1,5 sec (faster than 84% of all sites) average is of low accuracy ("låg tillförlitlighet") and has less than 100 data points.

The worst offenders to the speed of my site is that I have both google adsense and google analytics on it. I find it ironic.

From what I understand the time is sampled from visitors, and includes the time from the page request until the page is fully rendered.

I'd love to know what people do that get their times well below sub-second.

Ah, I see now... I didn't realize that this was end-user data via Google Toolbar opt-in. I've got "medium accuracy" 100-1000 data points, and I'm assuming that means total over the full 5 months. In that case, it doesn't surprise me that some combinations of visitors and connections might have long load times. But yes, the fact that non-visible elements seem to make a difference is not great.

There is a fair amount of variability in the data, just because it depends on who happens to be browsing your site (data is collected from people who have the Google tool bar installed and the page rank feature enabled). So you kind of have to look at the basic trend over multiple weeks.

They don't say though that this is the same data being used in their ranking factor.

If it is the same data they use for the ranking factor, doesn't this give me a way to tank my competitor's rankings? All you'd need to do is install the toolbar on browsers using some low bandwidth or throttled internet connection and browse the sites who rank above you.

All of my sites on Finnish servers have a load time under 1.5 seconds. Everything in Canada or the States fluctuate between 1.5 and 7 seconds.

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