How are load times displayed in Webmaster Tools calculated?

We have a question from Deepesh in New York, who asks “How does Google calculate site load times in the data it exposes in the Google’s webmaster statistics? Is the calculation simply average time to get and receive the HTML content for a page?”

I think the answer is yes. It’s pretty much it! Googlebot sends out the request and starting from there we time how long it takes for us to see the request back. So it is the end to end time for us to fetch the page or fetch the data from the server and that’s pretty much it. We are looking at it from Googlebot’s perspective, we have no idea how long it takes for any given user to fetch a page; we can only look at how long Googlebot takes. But that’s essentially what we are looking at.

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