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For public page, I can use pingdom.com to calculate the response time/uptime of a page over a certain period of time.

However, pingdom cannot time the response time of a webpage guarded behind a login page. For example, pingdom cannot check the response time for my Gmail inbox, as I would need to supply my gmail username and password to pingdom if I want that.

Is there anyway I can get the webpage loading time for the webpage that requires a username/password pair?

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Can't you just expose the page publicly for the duration of the test? – JCL1178 Jan 31 at 7:25
This really depends on the type of tool you want to use. Most webservers support the notion http(s)://user:password@server, for example. – initall Jan 31 at 7:57
@JCL1178, I can't because those pages are very personalized, in the same sense as the gmail inbox/facebook wall is personalized. – Graviton Jan 31 at 8:03
@initall, can you elaborate? Most webservers, can you give me any pointers on this? – Graviton Jan 31 at 8:03
If the document is protected with HTTP BASIC AUTHENTICATION, the embedding of username password is supported by Apache and others. Depends on your setup. Google for phrases like "http basic authentication username password in url". – initall Jan 31 at 8:07
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2 Answers

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Create a backdoor (just remember to remove it later on!)

For example: Access through page inbox.php?loginForTest=1 will automatically login you as a user with ID 25, or whichever you'd like to use use for test, and load this content without making any further authentication checks.

Assuming you write OOP you'd be able to change just a few lines of code in authentication class to load the content from a certain user perspective if certain GET data is set.

As for HTTP Authentication - you got most of the answers in comments already. Use the @ syntax in URL to login as a user.

If you still won't be able to get through the login form - try to use firebug for more basic tests - just remember to run in several times to get a proper average and don't compare data from firebug with data from pingdom or other similar services as they might have different method of obtaining timings.

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As a general practice, backdoors are dangerous and I would not recommend them. In this example, if pingdom.com was compromised, someone could have access to the backdoor URLs to access potentially sensistive user information on your site. – joshuahedlund Jan 31 at 18:48
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Google Analytics now has Site Speed information. You can run the analytics script on logged-in pages and view the results there.

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