Creating a page-load performance profile provides a systematic way of looking at a Web page and recording its performance characteristics across a wide area network (WAN). A page-load performance profile incorporates the distance, congestion, and limited bandwidth that 99 percent of your users experience when accessing your site.

Page-load performance profiles can help you determine the following:

• The impact of not setting expiration dates.
  
  
• Which files are taking the longest to load.
  
  
• Whether you have unneeded file content.
  
  
• Where to reduce and consolidate files.
  
  
• How long your pages take to load (on first access and second access).
  
  
• Whether you need to enable or adjust your compression configuration.
  
  

To perform a page-load test, install the appropriate tools to collect data so that you can develop performance profiles by analyzing HTTP traffic. Network Monitor is a protocol analyzer that looks into packet-level detail. For more information about obtaining and using this tool, see Network Monitor overview in Help and Support Center for Windows Server 2003.

After obtaining page-load performance profiles for your Web pages, you can use the performance data to identify changes that you can make in order to optimize the performance of the Web pages.