If you own a Web server or a VPS and would like to see how quick it is at delivering your website pages and how efficient is it’s response time then you can try the following cUrl command from any other Linux Box and test your results, while this test will give you response time of your own website , you can still compare it with response time of popular websites like nytimes.com and lifehacker.com to get an idea of how much you lag behind them ( You can be quicker in response time too , if you have a mighty server !! )

So, just login to your shell and type this

curl -o /dev/null -w "Connect: %{time_connect} TTFB: %{time_starttransfer} Total time: %{time_total} \n" http://yoururl.com/

change the yoururl.com  to your own URL which you wish to test , and then test it for other popular websites like twitter, mashable or some other not so popular websites and see the difference.

Terminology

Connect : Time taken by cUrl to connect to the site ( dependent on your client Server’s bandwidth and Network )

Time To First Byte (TTFB) :– Time taken to receive first byte after connect ( How quick your Apache is , lower the value the better )

Total time : The last data is the total time for the site to finish loading. (Largely due to your PHP/ any other server side language performance )

So have fun, testing your Website I will write more about Website optimization and Apache, PHP as I have just shifted to a self managed VPS and I keep on learning new things and new ways to optimize it .