What is an 'acceptable' Total Execution Time?

[eluser]Eric Cope[/eluser]
I think that an appropriate load time is one that doesn't make your customers say, "Nuts to this, its taking too long!" As stated above, if the content is worth a load time of 5 seconds, then 5 seconds is appropriate.

Depending on your content, you can use things like flush to start displaying data so the end user does not have to wait until the end of execution to see something.

What type of machine are you using? Are there other sites on that machine? What type of content are you delivering? 100ms is nothing if you are downloading 100MB video.

[eluser]Lone[/eluser]
[quote author="Derek Allard" date="1213152798"]I once optimized the CI profiler so much that my total execution time was actually negative. Not that my friends is optimization![/quote]

Ok ok Derek, we understand you are God (although your spelling could do some work)


@Eric Cope: The loading time we are talking about is the exection time of the script by PHP (as shown by $this->output->enable_profiler(TRUE) rather then the full loading time of images/css etc. But I do agree around 5 seconds+ is the frustration point for end users loading the website overall.

[eluser]Eric Cope[/eluser]
[quote author="Lone" date="1213162543"][quote author="Derek Allard" date="1213152798"]I once optimized the CI profiler so much that my total execution time was actually negative. Not that my friends is optimization![/quote]

Ok ok Derek, we understand you are God (although your spelling could do some work)


@Eric Cope: The loading time we are talking about is the exection time of the script by PHP (as shown by $this->output->enable_profiler(TRUE) rather then the full loading time of images/css etc. But I do agree around 5 seconds+ is the frustration point for end users loading the website overall.[/quote]

But its the full loading time that your end users care about. So while balancing performance so as to reduce load on the server is a good thing, its the full load time that matters.

I am not sure of your content, but you might be able to use the caching functions of CodeIgniter to reduce some of your computation time.