The effect of early packet loss on Web page download times
Identification of the various elements contributing to the download time of Web objects has been the subject of much research. It is, however, the download time of a set of objects comprising an entire page which is of critical importance to the user — particularly in the presence of delay leading to subjectively long waits. Because browsers typically use parallel TCP connections to download the set of objects neither the overall page download time, or the contribution of delay, are simply the sum of the individual object download times or delays. We present a technique for identifying and examining the complete set of connections involved in a page download which then enables us to fully analyse the contributory time components and to assess the potentially serious delays which arise from loss early in the connections’ lifetimes.