Does the amount of javascript effect visual complete?

Analysis
1 
    SELECT pageid, rank, url, bytesJS, visualComplete 
        FROM [httparchive:runs.latest_pages] 
        WHERE 
            rank < 10000 AND 
            visualComplete != 0 AND 
            bytesJS != 0 
        ORDER BY visualComplete desc
2

Hmm… I don’t think the above query actually answer the question. We would need at least another level of aggregation to bucket the amount of downloaded JS and then see if there is a correlation between these buckets and visualComplete.

Which, I’m guessing, is what @souders is doing on the HTTP Archive site: http://httparchive.org/interesting.php#onLoad

3

@igrigorik There is bytesJS to correspond to what I beleive is the total amount of js downloaded for a page.

If you graph the data in a scatter plot you can find a positive trend line. I beleive there is alot of noice from sites that are infinte scroll with lots of images.

Do you have a suggestion on a quiery that might find a trend?

4

Throwing the data into R gives the following (after eliminating some outliers):

Pearson correlation between the two: 0.3878254 … which I guess qualifies as a “moderate positive” relationship. Intuitively, this makes sense, but I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions from it.

5

I agree from this data nothing can be concluded.

I am sure that how the javascript is used is more important then how much is sent to the browser. I would guess serving 500kb of garbage will have less of an effect then a while loop calling append to the same element each time.

Though it would be interesting to track how much time a browser spends on rendering the effects of javascript.