A Question of Timing

Photo by Aron / Unsplash

When considering website performance, the term TTFB - time to first byte - crops up regularly. Often we see measurements from cURL and Chrome, and this article will show what timings those tools can produce, including time to first byte, and discuss whether this is the measurement you are really looking for.

Timing with cURL

cURL is an excellent tool for debugging web requests, and it includes the ability to take timing measurements. Let’s take an example website www.zasag.mn (the Mongolian government), and measure how long a request to its home page takes:

First configure the output format for cURL in ~/.curlrc:

$ cat .curlrc
-w "dnslookup: %{time_namelookup} | connect: %{time_connect} | appconnect: %{time_appconnect} | pretransfer: %{time_pretransfer} | starttransfer: %{time_starttransfer} | total: %{time_total} | size: %{size_download}\n"

Now connect to the site dropping the output (-o /dev/null) since we’re only interested in the timing:

$ curl -so /dev/null https://www.zasag.mn
dnslookup: 1.510 | connect: 1.757 | appconnect: 2.256 | pretransfer: 2.259 | 
starttransfer: 2.506 | total: 3.001 | size: 53107

These timings are in seconds. Depending on your version of cURL, you may Continue reading