I need to measure load time on a page navigation. Here is my situation:
When I navigate, the page laod is taking variable time as the ajax elements load. How to be certain that the page is fully loaded to measure its load time correctly?
I cannot be specific that locating a particular element(text, table, or image...) indicate the complete page load as page load depends on data.
Please help me deal with this situation.
Thanks
Do you want to be able to test this on an "as needed" basis or do you want to instrument the pages so that you gather data from all your users?
If you just need to do it on an ad-hoc basis then http://webpagetest.org will help you - providing there's not too long a gap between the AJAX requests it will include them.
If you want to look gather data across all AJAX calls then you will need to instrument the success and failure callbacks to store the time they finish and calculate the difference between the last one and the page start. Then once you've got this push the value to Google Analytics or something else.
If all your AJAX calls are designed to complete before onload fires then the existing SiteSpeed numbers in Google Analytics might be good enough for you.
Related
Since my web application using many AJAX request so categorize as Single Page Application.
what i want is to track AJAX technical performance using Google Analytics.
Regarding to GA document, it suggest to implement Virtual Pageviews Tracking as detail in this link
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/single-page-applications
After implement virtual pageviews tracking, Pageviews stats and Page URI seem to be feed into GA correctly. But Timing Stats such as Avg.Page Load Time (sec) are not. all of them have no value!
I tried these 3 senario to implement Virtual Page Tracking but non of them is working.
do i miss something ? or it's GA limitation so we can not collect Timing stats of Virtual Page just like Real Pageview ?
any others Tools suggestion to track AJAX performance ?
GA is not meant to be used to track page performance and the Value in ga implies monetary value.
When it says "tracking pageviews" it's not about measuring performance, it's about tracking user activity. As in, how many pages per session, what pages, what led to conversions, where they have troubles going through and so forth. Not a technical tool, but an analytics/marketing tool.
Technically, you still could use it to track page performance and people do it. But not as you've done it. You have to remove any network influence on your timestamps since normal fluctuation there would exceed the useful timing of page performance.
I think the most elegant way of doing it would be creating a custom metric in GA interface and then populate it with performance measuring events (or pageviews). So:
You take a new Date() timestamp (or whatever you do in jquery to get current timestamp) right before the post request
You get another new Date() in the post callback
You calculate the difference in milliseconds and send that as the value of the custom metric with the pageview
You wait for two days for the new data to get processed and build a custom report using your custom metric.
Now when you improve performance of your endpoint, you will be able to see statistical improvements in that report.
This is usually done on the backend though, with the datadog or a similar tool with endpoint monitoring functionality.
When performance is measured on the front-end, we usually use the native performance API, so the window.performance object. Or whatever your front-end rendering library suggests using for that. Here's a bit more on this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/performance_property That way you're taking into account a bit more data, not just one endpoint response time.
Is it possible to go back in a page without reloading it?
I am developing a Web Forms website and every time a go back in history, the page reloads (and takes a long time).
Following is the curl of the page:
Honestly, no.
The life cycle of a Web Form is very specific and the page goes through it every time it is run (that is every time you request it through your browser).
On the other hand, you can always optimize your page to make it load faster. How you do it depends on many things one of which is what code runs on the server side upon loading and if any portions of that code can be either optimized for speed or moved in event handlers to be executed at a later point in time. For example, if you're fetching data from a database when your page loads consider applying paging to narrow the number of selected rows.
Please, feel free to ask a new question if you decide to take that course of action.
I have a Django server. The server loads a webpage with almost all static content but a few numbers must load from the database.
I'm thinking about performance/price; I can host my Django server on a fast server and render the page using Django templates. or I can host the server on a slower machine and make a static page that loads the few numbers using ajax and host the page cheaply somewhere else like github.io.
The latter choice will have most of the page load real quick and real cheap.
I was wondering what are the trade-offs ?
Whichever server you decide to hire, you should always think of reducing the server load - no matter how fast your server is. By reducing server load I mean only make your server do what is really required at the moment.
Let's learn something from the big players like Facebook, for instance
You log into your account and you see that you've got 5 notifications and 3 new messages plus a couple of photos and highly interesting statuses of your friends. Cool! You now click on the notifications icon to find out if that hot girl (forgive me if you're a girl :D) has added you to her friends list or not. As you click a big white <div> pops up AND you see nothing but a loading gif! The notifications do appear, but after a couple of seconds. Try doing it with a slow internet connection, and you get to adore the beauty of the loading gif for a lot more time.
So, what do you make of it?
Facebook only made it's server count the number of notifications and new messages, and displayed those numbers to you. Thus reducing server load. It only displayed the notifications to you when you wanted to see them. And to load the notifications, all it took was a minimal AJAX call in which only around 10 KB of data was transferred!
Facebook does it all the time and everywhere. Consider this: Robert Downey Jr. posts a photo of himself on his Facebook page. A little while later, you see that it has got 10k+ comments. You decide to read them and click the comments button. An attractive loading gif pops up again for a little while and is soon replaced by comments. But hey, only 10 comments were loaded. What the ... Oh wait! That's how Facebook reduces its server load - read those 10 comments first, if you want to read more, send a request again.
Twitter does it too - the infinite scroll.
Icing on the cake
This approach benefits you in two ways:
It reduces server load - less chances of crashing a website.
It decreases your website's page-load time since you'll be passing less data i.e. the data required at that moment. Thus making your website faster. (Yes, it can outrun Flash, too!)
Food for thought
If you've got some cool technologies around such as AJAX, why not use it? Your server is not a donkey, for God's sake!
P.S. By Facebook and Twitter, I mean the engineers behind them.
Well It would depend on the following:
A. Whether you want to Display that number on Page load itself or when user clicks to see it* ?
If you want to show the the numbers at the time of Page load Itself than it is preferable to get them at time of Template response itself.
Why do you would want your Site Visitors to wait till those numbers populate (if the intention is to display them) ?
If it is to be displayed on User's click only then Ajax should be preferred
B. How much Time is this Query going to take and Can the query be optimized to minimal time ?
If the Query you are making takes a Lot of time than first effort should be made to optimize that query to be as fast as possible,
If the query can give result in minimal time than it is futile to do another Request to Server via Ajax.
But if you know the Query will take a lot of Time than Ajax is fine.
On my website landing page, I am calling various AJAX actions.But the performance is poor as of now.These actions are
To get latest articles
To get latest news
To get latest Jobs
To get recent added users etc.
I am showing all this information in dashboards for each AJAX actions.
My question is,
From my AJAX actions, should I return the HTML or JSON? Which one would be better in performance and maintainance point of view?
I have following few points on these approaches -
HTML
Pros-
1. Will be easy to code
2. Easy to maintain.If there is any UI change in dashboard, with HTML it would be easy to do.
Cons-
1. Performance hit as complete HTML would be sent on client side.
JSON-
Pros-
1. Good performance as data transfer size would be less.
Cons-
1. UI change in dashboard would be comparatively diffcult as I need to change JS code rendering logic.
I want to understand if my assumptions are correct or not.And if there are any other points in these approaches?
Loading and embedding HTML directly as opposed to just sending the data and transferring it into a DOM structure client-side should not be so much different when it comes to performance.
Usually the greatest performance “killer” in an HTML page environment are HTTP requests – they take close to “forever” compared to all other stuff you do client-side. So if you have to pull data for multiple such widgets, it might be a good idea to encapsulate those data transfers into just one HTTP request, and have the different widgets read their data from there once its loaded. And for that, a data format like JSON might be preferable over HTML.
I have been trying to research the hack proposed by Avinash Kaushik in his book Web Analytics 2.0. He poses the problem whereby most web analytics tools are unable to record the time a user spent on the last page they visit on a website, or on the only page they visit. In other words if user comes to page 1, a timestamp is created showing the time they arrived at the page, when they visit page 2, a second timestamp is created. The time spent on page 1 can be calculated by timestamp 2 - timestamp 1. However if the user closes the browser window or navigates away from the website there is no way to record time on page 2. Here is a link to this problem on Kaushik.net
standard-metrics-revisited-time-on-page-and-time-on-site
One proposed hack is to use the window.onbeforeunload event to call a method and push the time that the page was unloaded to google analytics. So I tried the following code -
window.onbeforeunload = capturePageExit;
function capturePageExit()
{
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/page-exit?page=' + document.location.pathname + document.location.search + '&from=' + document.referrer]);
return("You are about to close this page");
}
Using firebug I can see that the correct __utm.gif image is requested and the correct params are sent to google analytics. But clearly there is a problem now that this will be called on each page unload and so each visitor will appear to go from page1 -> page-exit -> page2 -> page-exit -> page3 -> page-exit... but I should get a more accurate time on site reading, right?
However this is at the expense of accurate navigation-summary data and so not a good solution. What would be good is if I could tell - if user has clicked the close browser/tab button or is navigating away from my site then record the page-exit.
I cant find a great deal of information about how to solve this problem, plenty of discussion about being aware of this inaccuracy when interpreting google analytics (and most web analytics tools probably), another useful link is time_on_page_and_time_on_site_how_confident_are_you
Just wanted to raise this on stackoverflow as I cant find a similar question and start a discussion about this, but my interpretation is that there isnt really a way around this problem but it is just better to be aware of it.
any thoughts?
------------------------------------------------------ UPDATE -----------------------------------------------------
Here is another link that was suggested to me from a blog called Savio.no, is this a good method?
how-to-measure-true-time-with-google-analytics
Web Analytics is not an exact science. Data is always approximate and most of the time sampled.
Web Analytics tools strive for Precision not accuracy. This whitepaper describes why it's more important to have precision and less important to have accuracy when working with Web Analytics.
Once you understand the difference between precision and accuracy and why it matters you will understand that it's not important to get the exact time on site metric, but a precise measure that could clearly express trendings or changes to that metric.
On other words forget about absolute numbers, learn to report using trends and changes.
Another advice, don't bother tweaking GA to render every single metric perfectly if you're never gonna use it. Bother with metrics that you can use. And by use I mean Actionable analysis.
There are, however a few cases were some code tweaking can help you out measuring the time on site. A clear example is a weblog. You may want to implement something like that in a weblog, ince most of your visits will be looking at your homepage, reading your posts and then leaving, all that is done in the same single PageView so it may be a good idea to fire an event when the user leaves to get the correct time on site, or maybe fire an event when the user scrolls past some threshold, in the end you'll be measuring the same ting, if the user scrolls more he reads more, and if the user spends more time then he reads more. So it may not make sense to track those 2 metrics to measure the same effect. Just choose one and stick with it, leave it running for a while to create historical data and then make use of it.