PHP Speed Test for user connection speed without echo in current page

Question

I am looking for a possibility to check the user connection speed. It is supposed to be saved as a cookie and javascript files as well as css files will be adapted if the sp

Answer 1

The problem here is that you can't really solve this nicely, and probably not in pure PHP. The approach you've taken will make the user download (512x512) = 262 144 bytes of useless data, which is much bigger than most complete pages. If the user is on a slow connection, they may assume your site is down before the speed test is over (with 10 kB/sec, it'd take half a minute before anything interesting shows up on screen!).

You could make an AJAX request for a file of a known size and time how long that takes. The problem here is that the page needs to be already loaded for that to work, so it'd only work for subsequent pages.

You could make a "loading" page (like you see on GMail when accessing it from a slow connection) that preloads the data, with a link to the low-bandwidth version (or maybe a redirect if the loading is taking too long).

Or you could save the "start" time in the cookie and make an AJAX request when the page is done loading - that would give you the actual loading time of your page; if that's, say, over 10 seconds, you may want to switch to the low-bandwidth version.

None of these, however, will get you the speed on the very first access; and sending a big empty page up front is not a very good first impression either.