Possible changes to grading

[pmeenan]

[Edit] The changes discussed below are now live

FYI, I'm contemplating some changes to the grades from WebPagetest and wanted to see how people felt about them:

CDN - Change this from a grade to a yes/no (and probably green/yellow) since CDNs don't make sense for all sites. The big red F has been hard for people to ignore, even if they serve a small market all geo-located close to their servers.

JS/CSS Combine - Change the grading for this to account for browsers not blocking on JS download and using 6 concurrent connections (usually). I'm considering changing it to only start deducting points after 5 files before start render (to allow the base page to still be downloading) if it is on the same domain or 6 on a separate domain and then deduct a grade for every 6 files (any mix of JS and CSS). IE 6/7 will still suck pretty badly but it's not nearly as much of a problem for the more modern browsers.

First Byte Time - I've seen WAY more back-end problems than I would like (usually CMS systems like wordpress without caching implemented) and those are getting a complete pass currently. I'm considering adding a new grade for the first byte time and use the socket connect time as a baseline (since that is the native RTT). I'm thinking RTT + 100ms = A and then deduct a letter grade for every 100ms after that. Any redirects would pretty much trip this automatically.

Thoughts?

-Pat