Unlike the traditional approaches to monitoring page load times, BrowserHawk's patented PLT technology provides complete, end-to-end visibility into the responsiveness of your site in the "real world", for every one of your actual users.
The performance of every aspect of the system, from the user's browser, across the Internet, and to your web server is accounted for – including the performance of any backend systems such database servers.
Traditionally, page load times have only been approximated using techniques such as the following:
Monitoring stations: With this technique, automated "bots" reside at one or more strategic locations throughout the Internet. These bots periodically poll a site and gauge the amount of time it takes for page content to be retrieved.
Although monitoring stations are useful for ensuring that a web site is up and operational, this technique does not provide an accurate view of the page load times as experienced by your actual users.
This is because monitoring stations use synthetic transactions which simulate user activity. Thus, differences that greatly affect web site responsiveness in the "real world", such as the latency, quality, and speed of each user's connectivity go unaccounted for.
Basic timing functions: With this technique, code is placed at the beginning of a page that notes its start time, which is later compared to a time taken when the page finishes loading.
Basic timing functions do not provide an accurate view of page load times as experienced by your visitors because they do not account for network latency, which is often significant. Nor do these functions account for the conditions under which a page is accessed or viewed.
For instance, a page viewed from cache will load much faster than a page from the server. Without this knowledge of a "HitType" that differentiates the conditions under which load times were measured, the load time data becomes contaminated.
Unlike these traditional approaches, the page load times measured by BrowserHawk are the complete load times as experienced by your actual site users. BrowserHawk tracks the exact latency, intra-page load time, and overall load time for each visitor to your site, and also classifies the type of hit such as whether a page was served by the browser’s cache.
Furthermore, BrowserHawk provides data points not available with traditional page monitoring tools, such as the user's type of browser, type of connection (broadband vs. dial-up), and the country where the user resides (country detection requires CountryHawk, available separately). These data points add tremendous value to the analytics process by helping you quantify and measure results for these customer segments individually.
In addition, unlike with traditional page load time monitors, BrowserHawk's PLT data is availabe at run-time for you to display in the page or even to take action on the page. For example, you can program a page to take a special action if it is viewed from the browser's cache, or if you detect the visitor's load times are too slow. See the PLT FAQ for more information.
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