Slightly OT

[Tim]

On Mon, 2012-05-14 at 09:28 +1000, Roger wrote:
> I have been asked to test whether sites we are building with Drupal 7 
> will load rapidly, and what the response time may be for each page
> when accessed with a minimal or older style computer which is on dial
> up, etc, possibly with less than optimal copper to exchanges and
> homes, etc. Currently the sites are in test phase, not live.
> Where there are images on the site, these are few and minimal, 72dpi
> and not larger than 300px square, most are on or below 150kb in size.
>  
> I have built functional html/css sites in the past and have a basic 
> understanding of how to construct a site that loads and responds under
> those conditions but have no idea whether Drupal/php provides similar 
> load times for pages.

You've hit the nail on the head with regards to the usual culprits
(number of graphics on the page, and filesize of them).  Usually they
have more of an effect on low-speed browsing than whatever generated the
page.  Unless your dynamic generator has to do a lot of negotiation back
and forth to render a page; or your server is overloaded, then all
browsers get a slow experience.

There are throttling options for proxy servers, like Squid, so you could
try browsing through it (when throttled) to see a slower network
response.  But that's not really a true test, slow networks have latency
issues, too, not just slower throughput.  There probably are some
on-line tests for slow browsing.  You could possibly see how it goes
browsing through one of those anonymising servers, as an external
throttler to your experience.

These days, you also test how a site will work on someone's mobile
phone.  Since they're becoming more common, and they bring their own set
of problems.  Whenever someone shows off their new phone toy to me, I
always have a bash at my own website on it.  Horrid things, though.  You
really need a magnifying glass and a tiny pointing stick to use them...

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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