The following is a demonstration of the weblatency.d script. Here we run weblatency.d while a mozilla browser loads the http://www.planetsolaris.org website. After the website was loaded, Ctrl-C was hit to print the following report, # weblatency.d Tracing... Hit Ctrl-C to end. ^C HOST NUM static.flickr.com 1 images.pegasosppc.com 1 www.planetsolaris.org 5 blogs.sun.com 7 HOST AVGTIME(ms) static.flickr.com 65 blogs.sun.com 285 images.pegasosppc.com 491 www.planetsolaris.org 757 HOST MAXTIME(ms) static.flickr.com 65 images.pegasosppc.com 491 blogs.sun.com 962 www.planetsolaris.org 3689 This gives us an understanding on which hosts were responsible for the time endured while loading the website. It turns out that requests to www.planetsolaris.org were the slowest, with a maximum time of 3.7 seconds (probably the first request, which incurred a DNS lookup). The following shows the same google lookup performed on a number of sites, # weblatency.d Tracing... Hit Ctrl-C to end. ^C HOST NUM www.google.com.au 3 www.google.co.uk 3 www.google.com 3 www.google.co.nz 3 HOST AVGTIME(ms) www.google.co.nz 450 www.google.com.au 502 www.google.com 567 www.google.co.uk 595 HOST MAXTIME(ms) www.google.co.nz 544 www.google.com.au 559 www.google.com 744 www.google.co.uk 763 From the average time you would guess that I was running this from New Zealand (the fastest), with times to the other hosts following suit (Australia, USA, UK). I was actually running this from Australia - it's interesting that the New Zealand server responded slightly faster. Now several websites are loaded as a larger demonstration, # weblatency.d Tracing... Hit Ctrl-C to end. ^C HOST NUM shop.abc.net.au 1 static.technorati.com 1 sunopensolaris.112.2o7.net 1 www.theage.com.au 1 ffxcam.smh.com.au 1 sunglobal.112.2o7.net 2 embed.technorati.com 2 technorati.com 2 fdimages.fairfax.com.au 4 blogs.sun.com 5 bugs.opensolaris.org 7 www.abc.net.au 34 www.smh.com.au 51 HOST AVGTIME(ms) ffxcam.smh.com.au 0 sunglobal.112.2o7.net 0 www.abc.net.au 56 www.theage.com.au 64 shop.abc.net.au 65 www.smh.com.au 73 fdimages.fairfax.com.au 88 blogs.sun.com 130 bugs.opensolaris.org 162 static.technorati.com 350 technorati.com 352 embed.technorati.com 632 sunopensolaris.112.2o7.net 900 HOST MAXTIME(ms) ffxcam.smh.com.au 0 sunglobal.112.2o7.net 0 www.theage.com.au 64 shop.abc.net.au 65 fdimages.fairfax.com.au 243 www.smh.com.au 244 blogs.sun.com 293 www.abc.net.au 315 static.technorati.com 350 technorati.com 356 bugs.opensolaris.org 560 sunopensolaris.112.2o7.net 900 embed.technorati.com 973 It's interesting that the most common host (www.smh.com.au, NUM == 51), responded with a fast AVGTIME (73 ms). The reason for this may be due to cacheing by my proxy server. Less common hosts such as embed.technorati.com were quite slow. The results from weblatency.d are interesting, but they don't point the finger at one single cause for website latency. The value here is the response time experienced by the client - which is a combination of many response times (link speeds, proxy server, DNS server, web server).