Speed: Data on top 1000 header load time vs full load time

Lots of tools give a different number for the speed of a site, how it is for users, over different channels, providers, including rendering time or not, including many elements or not.

This is the 'hardest' test of all:

• With a little script I checked the top 1000 pages from the Alexa list*. The first script tests how long it takes to get the http header back (yes, document exists, and yes, I know where it is and it is OK), These are the blue dots.
• The second script downloads ALL page elements of the homepage, including images, scripts, stylesheets, also from integrated third party tools like enlighten, tealeaf, omniture, or whatever a site uses. These are the orange dots.

First I ran this without time limit, and when I checked back the next day, it was still running, so I set the timeout to 20 seconds.

There seems to be a clear connection between header response time and full time, not so much between rank in the top 1000 by traffic and speed.

sorted by full download time

sorted by traffic rank

There also seems to NOT be a clear connection on how rank by traffic (x-axis) correlates to full download time. This shows that we have a great opportunity to outperform many other companies with faster download speeds.

* Alexa (owned by Amazon) publishes the top 1 Million websites by traffic, globally, based on data from  many different browser plugins plus from Amazon (cloud?) services.