Error: Reaction Times are Measured Incorrectly?

Hi everyone,

I have been successfully (imho) using Limesurvey for three years and I love it. Thank you for your great work.
However, now, I have encountered an issue with which, please, maybe you could help me:

I used Limesurvey Version 3.15.6+190108 locally on XAMPP (Windows 10, 64-bit) to design a survey.
Limesurvey, of course, measures, reaction time for each page that is answered.
In my survey, I created several pages with text that forward automatically to the next page after 3 seconds. There is no option to interact with these pages.
I was hoping to measure a general latency of the hardware and internet setup of future online respondents to my survey.
Unfortunately, when I activated and tested the survey I realized that the reaction time measures vary considerably for these pages.
I tested three times and the reaction times varied between 3.69 and 4.91 seconds, although, of course, I tested the survey locally with the exact same setup and the pages forwarded each after 3 seconds.

Do you know if this is an error in Limesurvey?
Is there a way to prevent this, i.e. to suppress this variation of reaction time measurement?

Thank you so much,
Daniel

Thank you very much for your reply.
I realize that reaction times are an issue with online experiments. However, I was not expecting the maximum delay to be almost 200% higher than the lowest if the study is run locally with browser, server, OS, etc. all the same (and nothing else running in background). That's a bummer :/
Studies seem to suggest that they are more reliable (cf. URL: peerj.com/articles/1058/ )
Thanks again,
Daniel

Hi, thank you for your reply. However, I'm sorry, I can't follow.
Do you suggest that I should not use the timer provided by Limesurvey but jquery?
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with jquery. I have to write the code in the question's source code, right?
I would appreciate a lot if you could elaborate.
Thank you so much

I couldn't find an option in Limesurvey to 'hide the during loading' :/ (only 'hide question'?)

Thank you!
I tested it. Unfortunately, I still get a considerable variance in page load times with your theme although your theme seems slightly better: 3.78-4.82s with Vanilla; 4.2-5.2s with Skelvanilla.
Please, do you have another suggestion?

Apart from this, your theme looks great and I would like to use it. However, I need the grey background from Vanilla as I present images with white background. Could you please tell me how to get the grey background back in your theme?
Thanks a lot

Thank you! That worked <3

Do you or someone else maybe have another suggestion for the response time measurement?