Google Labs Site Performance

So I haven't posted in awhile. I've just been off working on the web site, which brings in a lot more money than this blog. I have started a few posts, but never ended up finishing them, so they got deleted.

Anyway I wanted to re-post some more data on Google's Site Performance, which shows page loading speed. This is their estimate of how long it takes a page to render in a browser. Than all the pages viewed that day are averaged into a single number.

There's nothing new with this post from any of the previous posts on this topic, which can be found by searching in the blog bar above for 'site performance', but I did change a setting on the server the other day.

I had the server set up to log visitor data for both AWSTATS and Webalizer. I really use AWSTATS each day, if I look at it, but there were times when I wanted to see data from Webalizer (which formats the same data a bit different). I also use Google Analytics to capture visitors data, so I had three different programs collecting the same data. The Google product is the best, but I have history data with AWSTATS so I really want to keep that running for comparing previous years.

On the 7th of this month I turned, the server-side,  Webalizer off, and waited to see if that improved the site performance of the web-site. A week later I still can't say if removing that program helped at all, but the page speed seemed to get faster {at first}.

One week of data is not much, so it's still to early to make any kind of judgment, but I am watching. The graph below shows the data for the last six months. The first big drop (increase in speed) in July is the day I turned of Webalizer. Note that the speed decreased a few days later and than decreased again, but changes in speed should be considered normal. It's the drop that got my attention.

There's nothing special about the speed, the site has hovered around 3 seconds for over a year. At this point all the pic files have been optimized, excess white space has been removed form the site and so on. Not much more I could do. Maybe send out a mess email to the world to upgrade their PC, so the site loads faster.....

I should say, that I'm always adding new data, either as new pages or additions to an existing page. So I would consider it 'normal' for the page speed to get slower regardless of what I do, because all the pages are slowly growing larger. More picture files are also always being added. So I may have reduced the [code] size of a page by removing all the white-space, but added more text off setting any speed improvement.

I'll add a comment in a few days to update the data, if it changes one way or the other. But it's something to think about, if your running a bunch of server side stuff that may not be required.