MacOS – Measuring page download speed Network Link Conditioner

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I'd like to use Network Link Conditioner in conjunction with a local page download speed tool so that I can see how long certain elements take to download when I restrict connection speeds.

Can someone recommend a page download speed tool (with waterfall visuals) that works well with Network Link Conditioner?

Best Answer

I am a big fan of using Safari's built in Web Inspector for this sort of task.

Open Safari preferences, go to Advanced and tick the check to show the Develop menu in the menu bar.

Now you can refresh a page and see detailed information on the Timelines section to graph page load times, delays and whatever sequence of steps was needed to render the current page.

Safari Web inspector

You can also use command line tools like curl in conjunction with the time command or using curl's internal timing options curl --trace-time to pick apart some of the files or scripts if you want to get a statistical level of repeatability as opposed to a broad overview of an entire page load.

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