[thelist] uncached page load time

[Bob Meetin]

I have been having some sporadic problems with my local broadband 
connection - trying to diagnose with the problem might be my old 
actiontec dsl modem or other.  This comes to that and it prompted me to 
run some very repetitive page load times with a stopwatch. 

One of the sites I'm "benchmarking" comes in at about 169k page size and 
is loading in about 9 seconds; the broadband download speed tests at 
about 1.33 kbps when I check it out at speedtest.net.  169k is not tiny 
but it is also not huge.  To be sure of the results, I have been 
clearing cache after each test and starting by default at google.

Websiteoptimization.com says for a 1.44mbps network connection the page 
should load in about 5 seconds. 

So a few questions.

1) I'm consistently seeing a 9 second average.  Any suggestions why the 
variance?  I have tested 2 different actiontec modems and the results 
are similar.

2) In the world of broadband, what is reasonable, acceptable these days 
in terms of load time? 

3) Do others target download time or page size?

-- 
Bob Meetin