A bit confused about chrome results

[pmeenan]

ok, some progress. It looks like Chrome isn't actually waiting for the full base HTML to download, it is just a lot slower to spin up the additional requests. For a site where the base page takes longer to download you can see the overlap that you would expect:

   

IE (on the test machines anyway) is a lot faster to get started on the subsequent requests:

   

Historically when I saw a similar problem it was because chrome would start a new renderer process right there which caused it to be slower. It was a problem where they were not re-using the about:blank renderer by default so I switched chrome to "process per tab" mode to get it to re-use the same renderer going from about:blank to the measured page. That doesn't appear to be the problem right now but I'll see if I can track it down further.

The good news is that the behavior is actually accurate when navigating from about:blank to the tested page in a new browser session - I just don't know why it is happening yet.