Need some help interpreting a test result

Web Performance Discuss Test Results
1

Hello

I’ve been told by clients that occasionally the webpagetest.org’s test shows the the page load time being extremely long for no apparent reason, sometimes it’s even taking more than 20 seconds to load the page.
I have one test result they’ve sent me to investigate:
[url]http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131202_55_J30/1/details/[/url]
I’m intrigued by the ‘white space’ between the browser operations.
What can cause such behaviour? Also the SSL negotiation time seems very long.
Another test I did for comparison:
[url]http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131212_TM_GHZ/1/details/[/url]
It also shows extremely long SSL handshake time but exhibits no idle time between requests.

Would someone please help me to understand if those are glitches in the test environment or some real random faults on the web server/in the content?

Regards
Priit

2

Try turning on tcpdump capture and Chrome timeline recording (when testing with Chrome) and those will give you a lot more visibility into what the browser is doing.