Measuring client-side performance of Web-apps

About 80% of Web-application loading time is spent on the browser. Since users prefer faster web sites, the user experience is affected by what happens on the browser.
Thus, it is possible to improve the user experience by breaking down, measuring, and optimizing the activities on the browser.

Enter Page Detailer, a graphical tool that measures client side performance of Web pages.
Page Detailer assesses performance from the client's perspective by showing how the page was delivered to the browser. It provides detailed graphical and tabular views about the timing, size, data flow, and identity of each item in a page, shown in the order started by the browser.

It has a very simple interface and is very easy to use -it will automatically capture, time, and plot calls made by the browser.

It is very useful to:

• track number of items requested by page (how many files? From how many different servers?)
• track response time per request/item
• track connection time per request/item (loading many small files from too many servers? Requesting too many small files?)
• check overall page size and load time
• check page structure and data flow
• optimize organization of content
• compare page load time using different transports mechanisms

Caveats
The captured data does not include the browser's rendering time, and does not time separately any intelligent use of lazy loading techniques. Thus, it is not an exact mirror of the end user experience.

There are trade-offs between client-side performance optimization and improvements to the (holistic) user experience, e.g.: uncompressed items 'travel slower' but render faster on the browser and vice-versa.

Download from IBM alphaWorks @ http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/pagedetailer

Similar tools

• Web Page Analyzer - Web-based Website performance tool and Web page speed analysis
• WebWait - simple Web-based website timer: type a URL and see how long it takes to load; useful to benchmark a website or test the speed of a web connection.
• Pingdom - Web-based monitoring suite which also tests the load time of a web page including all its objects.
• eValid - testing & analysis suite with recording and playback options.

References

• Response Time: Eight Seconds, Plus or Minus Two
• Performance Research, Part 1: What the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests
• Optimizing Page Load Time
• Latency quality ratings show a drop-off at around 8 to 10 seconds