Application responsiveness over a network, such as for a web site or
web-based application, is monitored and optionally recorded by tracking
actual end users interacting with the application and the time it takes
for their requested web pages to load. The process involves a web server
that sends instrumented web pages or pointers to such instrumentation
code in response to browser requests. This instrumentation causes
scripting code on the client browser to gather data sufficient to enable
determination of how long the page took to load, with separate
measurements for latency time and/or intra-page load time, and to
classify the type of request for which the measurements correspond. The
scripting code can report the values to a record keeper or an external
process. In one embodiment, Page Lifecycle Events are used to track and
update a Marker and Timestamp from which the page load times and
classifications are derived.