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Measure the Page Load Times of Your PRTG Installation

Written by Dirk Paessler | Mar 26, 2011

We recently added a hidden and experimental feature that allows you to measure the page load times of your PRTG installation (it was added in version 8.3). These measurements can be quite helpful when you try to optimize your server for optimal speed. You simply run the test, make a note of the measurements, then reconfigure your server and re-run the test to get a comparative measurement.

We have recently used this feature a lot to investigate performance problems and to find possible actions to avoid these problems (see: How to Lower Web Page Load Times of PRTG by 80%-90% in 4 Easy Steps).

Run the Speed Test Yourself

To run the speed test yourself you must first log into PRTG's web interface as an administrator. Then enter the following URL (http://[your_prtg_server]/speedtest.htm) into your browser address bar. The test will start immediately. It will request more than 150 URLs from the web server of PRTG (four iterations per URL) using AJAX. The request times of the http requests are measured and the page load times of each URL are displayed. When the test has finished the average page load time, as well as the slowest and fastest page load times, are displayed and can be used for comparison. Now change your PRTG server setup and re-run the test, then compare the results.

Important Notes

  • Note 1: We recommend to use Firefox 3.6 or Firefox 4.
  • Note 2: Only compare measurements taken with the same browser on the same workstation (alterations of the PC/browser combination affect the measurements).
  • Note 3: There are many parameters that affect the results of this test. Due to this fact measurements of one installation in one network can not simply be compared to other installations in other networks.
  • Note 4: This feature is an experimental feature and not covered by our official support.

Some Real World Measurements

We measured the following times on selected test systems (using PRTG version 8.3.3):

System CPU, OS Sensors Average Page Load Time Slowest Page Load Time
"AMD Barebone" Barebone Server AMD Athlon II X4 640 @ 3 Ghz, Win2k8R2, 4 Cores 4,000 246 ms 2,162 ms
"AMD Barebone" Barebone Server AMD Athlon II X4 640 @ 3 Ghz, Win2k8R2, 4 Cores 20,000 600 ms 10,342 ms
"8 Core Poweredge" DELL Poweredge Server 2950 Intel Xeon X3450 Dual @ 2.67 Ghz, Win2k8R2, 8 Cores 6,000 241 ms 2,331 ms
"4 Core Poweredge" DELL Poweredge Server 2850 Intel Xeon E5405 Dual @ 2 Ghz, Win2k8R2, 4 Cores 1,200 181 ms 845 ms
"Dual Core Optiplex" DELL Optiplex 980 Intel Core i5 750 @ 2.67 Ghz, Win2k8R2, 2 Cores 4,000 160 ms 1,113 ms
"Netbook" DELL Inspirion Mini Intel Atom Z520 @ 1.33 Ghz, Windows XP, 1 Core 1,400 469 ms 7,217 ms
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