Introduction

Gadgets that quickly load and are highly responsive to user input will be more popular, receive substantially more user interaction, and more likely to remain installed on a user's page. Compact, properly-cached gadgets also reduce hosting and bandwidth costs.

This tutorial describes a methodology for measuring gadget latency in Internet Explorer 7/8 and Firefox 3 for both uncached and cached page loads. You should also test the latency of your gadget on other browsers since performance will differ. The examples and screenshots below refer to iGoogle, but you could use this methodology on any OpenSocial container.

Check out the OpenSocial Latency Combat Field Manual for additional suggestions on improving latency. If you have any questions regarding latency, please join the discussion in our developer forum.

...

Now that you know how to measure your gadget's latency, check out the OpenSocial Latency Combat Field Manual for suggestions on reducing the number of requests and amount of data downloaded. You can also try profiling your JavaScript in Firebug to see what functions are taking up a lot of processing time, and performing similar measurements in other browsers like Safari and Chrome.

...