New Relic last week released the results of a study it conducted on 1 billion Web pages across the globe this month--and the data suggest Web page success can come down to a matter of seconds.

Using its new end-user technology, the application performance management company monitored actual page loads on Web sites across a variety of browsers and operating systems, including mobile, for the span of one week.

It takes an average of six seconds for a Web page to fully load, according to the research. That might not seem like a long time to the untrained observer, but CEO Lew Cirne says it's enough time for users to get distracted and move on. "Nielsen data suggests that it takes only one second before a user starts to notice a delay."

Interestingly enough, page load time is most often lost at the browser level, rather than on the network or at the server level. In fact, the study found that pages spent four of the six seconds in the browser, parsing and interpreting HTML, downloading assets and executing JavaScript.