Something strange I noticed with Pingdom

I did a test with vbseo on and off using Pingdom to measure page load times. I tested a typical showthread page (vb3.8 vbseo 3.3.0 - I know they're out of date)

Here's the page without vbSEO on:
Pingdom Tools

With vbSEO on:
Pingdom Tools

Take note that with vbSEO on the homepage loads. Is this because of the base href tag? Notice also the 176.8 KB vs 241.6 KB page size. When a visitor actually visits a page does the homepage also load?

It doesn't make any sense that with vbSEO the page actually loaded faster though. I'm not sure if this is just by chance or the page actually does load faster with vbSEO on.

Thoughts?

You would need to do 20+ tests and come up with an average and other statistical measuring. Load and users on your box may differ at any momet, as well as network traffic, etc.

As digg, etc icons are showing in the list, i don't think the homepage is loading.... looks normal for a showthread page.

Yeh, I know. It's just strange that with vbSEO on, the size of the page is larger. Why does it add in the base href anyway?

base is needed to make sure all paths are correct, especially when users use forum path directives, ie
section/page/1.html is up 1 directories from content.php as default, and without it the base cmmand, all the images/etc linked items would be dead as relative links.

vbseo adds the incons for bookmarks, linkback menus, permalinks, RR's, etc, so there is a larger html source size with vbseo enabled

Thanks for the explanation