Web page performance is measured by the amount of time it takes to download an entire Web page into your browser. So, when comparing the performance improvement delivered by Webcelerate Accelerator with an unaccelerated Internet connection, we configure two identical computers. Both are connected to the Internet at the same dial-up connection speed and both have the same PC and Internet browser configuration. Using an automated browsing measurement tool (i.e. a surfing "bot"), both computers visit the same Web pages multiple times. In order to eliminate variations in download speed caused by various network factors, we take the average times for downloading the same page with and without Webcelerate Accelerator and compare the two averages in order to determine the improvement factor for a specific Web page (example: www.amazon.com). 5X represents the high-end of the frequently measured averaged results.

If you are particularly interested in the topic of timing Web pages, here's a link to a site that provides a stopwatch for timing page loads and many other interesting Internet timing tools:

http://www.numion.com/Stopwatch/