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Browser-Based, Client-Side, Functional Testing & Validation,
Load & Performance Tuning, Page Timing, Website Analysis,
and Rich Internet Application Monitoring.

eValid -- URL vs. HTTP Relative Performance Comparison
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Main Idea: The time it takes to download a page to a user's browser is often much less than the total of the times it takes to download all of the page's components individually. This difference is due to the fact that the browser is multi-threaded and thus does a lot of the work in parallel.

Summary
The table below compares the measured empty-cache download times for various website top pages against the total empty-cache download time of the same page's set of component URLs when loaded serially.

The process used to collect this data was the following:

Results
Here are the collected results from a sample of typical websites.

# Page Byte Count Website Single URL Download Time
(sec)
# GetURLs Total GetURLs Download Time
(sec)
Ratio
11,020,240 www.cnn.com 7.484 187 53.063 7.090
2 493,418 www.latitude28.com 4.656 199.265 1.980
3669,578www.ibm.com 10.4228926.297 2.520
4152.027www.cityofchicago.org 6.734 32 17.531 2.750
5256,354www.wikipedia.org 4.078 2914.3283.513
6471,921www.slashdot.org 4.7655921.7264.568
785,568www.inventblog.com 3.5162310.350 2.955
8265,535www.wittmanhart.com 2.81325 7.5932.699
9274,968www.e-valid.com 6.95320 12.672 1.823
10208,363book.google.com 4.031 3516.890 4.190
11624,939www.skicb.com 12.984 5835.313 2.719
12720,357www.keynote.com 5.8756723.343 3.803
13119,536www.groundwork.it 7.4534815.609 2.094

Observations & Conclusions
Here are some observations about the above data.