I want to be able to monitor the performance(load time of the entire page, load times of individually downloaded js/cs files , amount of memory used by the browser for the page,etc) of my web application from the perspective of the user(i.e the browser client).
Is there any tool/plugin , that can help me monitor all of these?
This list should serve as a good starting point for you. It is a complete list of end user monitoring tools.
In order to count as an End User Experience Monitoring tool it must be able to track the response times that real users experience when visiting the site – not a robot which is synthetically pinging the site. Specifically I am referring to tools that would enable IT operations to ensure that the real end users of an application or website are experiencing good performance. As I have alluded to in a previous post “speed solves a lot of problems” – claiming that even if your usability is not perfect – if it runs fast – people are less likely to notice.
We built a tool to solve this problem, take a look at Bucky.
Try FIDDLER or CHARLES
Try http://www.yottaa.com (disclaimer: i work here) - it runs real browsers in different locations to monitor your site and record asset level performance data. You can also try Gomez or Keynote Systems.
You can try out Atatus - https://www.atatus.com/ which offers performance monitoring and error tracking in one place for all your apps.
Disclaimer: I work at Atatus.
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I was asked this question once at an interview:
"Suppose you own a website where the server is at some remote location. One day, some user calls/emails you saying the site is abominably slow. How would you identify why the site is slow? Also, when you check the website yourself as any user would (using your browser), the site behaves just fine."
I could think of only one thing (which was shot down):
Check the server logs to analyse incoming traffic. Maybe a DoS attack or exceptionally high traffic. Interviewer told me to assume the server has normal traffic and no DoS.
I was kind of lost because I had never thought of this problem. I have almost no idea how running a server/website works. So if someone could highlight a few approaches, it would be nice.
While googling around, I could find only this relevant, wonderful article. That article is kind of too technical for me now, but I'm slowly breaking it down and understanding it.
Since you already said when you check the site yourself the speed is fine, this means that (at least for the pages you checked) there is nothing wrong with the server and it can serve those pages at a good speed. What you should be figuring out at this point is what the difference is between you and the user that reports your site is slow. It might be a lot of different things:
Is the user using a slow network connection (mobile for example)?
Does the user experience the same problems with other websites hosted at the same webhoster? If so, this could indicate a network problem. Normally this could also indicate a resource problem at the webserver, but in that case the site would also be slow for you.
If neither of the above leads to an answer, you could assume that the connection to the server and the server itself are fine. This means the problem must be in the users device. Find out which browser/OS he uses and try to replicate the problem. If that fails find out if he uses any antivirus or similar software that might cause problems.
This is a great tool to find the speed of web pages and tells you what makes it slow: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
I think one of the important thing that is missing from above answers is the server location, which can play a vital in web performance.
When someone is saying that it is taking a longer time to open a web page that means high latency. High latency can be caused due to server location.
Let's assume as you are the owner of the web page then the server and client are co-located, so it will have a low latency.
But, now if client is across the border, then latency time will increase drastically. And hence a slow perfomance.
Another factor is caching which drastically affects the latency time.
Taking the example of facebook, they have server all over the world to reduce the latency time (and also to provide several other advantages) and they use huge caching system to cache their hot data (trending topics) whereas cold data (old data) are stored in hard disk so it takes a longer time to load an older photo or post.
So, a user might would have complained about this as they were trying load up some cold data.
I can think of these few reasons (first two are already mentioned above):
High Latency due to location of client
Server memory might need to be increased
Number of service calls from the page.
If a service could be down at the time of complaint, it could prevent page from loading.
The server load might be too high at the time of the poor experience. The server might need to increase the resources (e.g. adding another server/web server to the cluster).
Check if there was any background job running on the server at that time.
It is important to check the logs and schedules of the batch jobs to determine what all was running at that time.
Hope this help.
Normally the user takes the page loading time as a measure to find out that the site is slow. But if you really want to know that what is taking the maximum time the you can open the browser debugger by pressing f12. if your browser is chrome the click on network and see what calls your application is making and which are taking maximum time. If you are using Firefox the you need to install firebug. If you have that, then again press f12 and click on Net.
One reason could be the role of the user is different of your role. You might be having suppose an administrator privilege (some thing like super user role) and the code might be just allowing everything for such role that means it does not really do much of conditional checking to see what is allowed or not. Some times, it's a considerable over ahead to get all the privileges of the user and have the conditions checking, how course depends how how the authorization is implemented. That means, the page might be really slow for specific roles. Hence, you should find out the roles of the user and see if that is a reason.
Obviously an issue with the connection of the person connecting to your site OR it's possible it was a temporary issue and by the time you checked your site, everything was dandy. You could check your logs or ask your host if there was an issue at the time the slow down occured.
This is usually a memory issue and it can be resolved by increasing the Heap Size of the Web Server hosting the application. In case the application is running on Weblogic Server. Heap size can be increased in "setEnv" file located in Application Home.
Goodluck!
Michael Orebe
Though your question is quite clear, web site optimisation is a very extensive subject.
The majority of the popular web developing frameworks are for some reason, extremely processor inefficient.
The old fashioned way of developing n-tier web applications is still very relevant and is still considered to be best practice according the W3C. If you take a little time to read the source code structure of the most popular web developing frameworks you will see that they run much more code at the server than is necessary.
This may seem a bit of a simple answer but, the less code you run at the server and the more code you run at the client the faster your servers will work.
Sometimes contrasting framework code against the old fashioned way is the best way to get an understanding of this. Here is a link to a fully working mini web application which represents W3C best practices and runs the minimum amount of code at the server and the maximum amount of code at the client: http://developersfound.com/W3C_MVC_EX.zip this codebases is also MVC compliant.
This codebase comes with a MySQL database dump, php and client side code. To see this code in action you will need to restore the SQL dump to a MySQL instance (sql dump came from MySQL 8 Community) and add the user and schema permissions that are found in the php file (conn_include.php); setting the user to have execute permissions on the schema.
If you contrast this code base against all of the most popular web frameworks, it will really open your eyes to just how inefficient these frameworks are. The popular PHP frameworks that claim to be MVC frameworks aren’t actually MVC compliant at all. This is because they rely on embedding PHP tags inside HTML tags or visa-versa (considered very bad practice according the W3C). Also most popular node frameworks run way more code at the server than is necessary. Embedded tags also stop asynchronous calls from working properly unless the framework supports AJAX dumps such as Yii 2.
Two of the most important rules to follow with MVC compliance is: never embed server side tags (such as PHP tags) in HTML tags or visa-versa (unless there is a very good excuse such as SEO) and religiously never write code to run at the server if it can be run at the client. Also true MVC is based on tier separation, where as the MVC frameworks are based on code separation. True MVC compliance is very processor efficient. Don’t get me wrong MVC frameworks are very useful for a lot of things, but if you’re developing a site that is going to get millions of hits, they are quite useless, or at least they will drive your cloud bills so high that it will really eat into your company’s profits.
In summary frameworks don’t give much control over what code runs at the client or server and are very inefficient but you can get prototypes up and running quicker with less code.
In contrast the old fashioned way takes a bit more elbow grease but you have complete control over what runs at the server and what runs at the client.
As an additional bit of advice for optimisation avoid using pass-through queries and triggers and instead opt for stored procedures. Historically stored procedures weren’t invented at the time MVC was present as a paradigm but it definitely increases separation of concerns between the tiers and is much more processor efficient.
Hope this advice helps.
I am not able to find out anywhere that how can we do performance test manually.
Please help me out for this query.
Thanks!
Maybe you are looking for JMeter or a similar tool.
What browser? Most of the current browsers support the W3C Navigation Timing spec and expose performance data directly on the DOM. You can access it from the console, from javascript on your pages or from browser extensions that display the information.
If you want more detail like a resource load waterfall then you can usually access that directly from the dev tools provided by the various browsers.
One thing you will want to be really careful of is to make sure you do your testing in a configuration that is similar to the users. If you are running a server locally and testing from a browser on the same machine or even the same network then your performance data will be pretty worthless (unless it's an intranet app).
you can perform manual testing (Performance testing) for any webpage by optimizing your css, Javascript and images ( size).
I think JMeter is a best tool for same to check webpage testing if you want add some scripting you can also add.
Also you can check Yslow addons of firefox.This addons give you filter data to optimized your page perfromes.
Also there are some online link available.
How can we run performance testing manually for any webpage?
You can simple use GTMatrix tool which will response of your site Performaces overall in detail.
The best way to go for Performance Testing without any tool is to provide a Standard loading time for each page as per one's experience knowledge. Else request the client to provide an ideal time for each page. Against which the loading time can be verified. But in case of multiple user simultaneously JMeter is the best hands on Approach available. Its Open source. Easy to understand. And you get reports too.
But of course there are multiple factors that would hinder the Performance. They are :
Your network speed
The Server speed on which your application is hosted
The number of Simultaneous users using
The Heavy images in pages
Last but not the least unnecessary links, codes, in short memory consumption in Code, could be loops not required. All the gifts from Developer Teams !!
There are already plenty of hosted services for tracking server response times but we're looking for something to track page render/load times (i.e. browser renderer).
The problem with PageSpeed, YSlow, etc is they're on request where we want something that runs constantly and takes a reading every 15 mins for example.
Latest browsers have a window.performance.timing property which contains the timestamp at which some events occurred (such as domainLookupStart, domLoading, domInteractive, ...).
You may want to send a sample of those numbers to your servers.
See https://developer.mozilla.org/en/API/navigationTiming
Google Analytics has a page speed metric, you may want to look at it too.
Atatus monitors page load time and there by does Real User Monitoring (RUM), and also it monitors for JavaScript errors along with capturing all the user actions that lead to the error.
It also gives various views of how your performance is across geographical locations and browsers.
https://www.atatus.com/
https://www.atatus.com/blog/announcing-real-user-monitoring/
Disclaimer: I’m a web developer at Atatus.
We use GTmetrix to get daily Page Speed and YSlow scores. If you need a higher frequency, you can automate YSlow or Page Speed using Selenium or ShowSlow.
Try a free tool like dynaTrace's AJAX Edition 3. From the website: "Speed your page load times, optimize rendering, tune DOM execution, and compare to competition. Even integrate with Selenium, Watir or QTP to begin automating your performance tests. It's free, it's easy and it's now for both Firefox and IE."
I do work for dynaTrace, in full disclosure. But this simple, free tool should be very useful to you.
Best
GP
My agile team will be adding new features to a existing realty website. As we add the features we want to have a better handle on the site's overall performance as well as the performance of particular pages.
I would like to automate the gathering of performance metrics on a request/response basis for each page (e.g. what sub requests are sent out by the browser, how many are there, how much data is transferred, and how long did each request take to fulfill).
Firebug currently captures this information in its net panel, however, I haven't found any way to programmatically pull this information out.
Does anyone know of a way to pull this information out after a page has loaded?
We are currently running our user acceptance tests with Selenium and I have considered adding this feature to the selenium interface so that our tests could run and collect the data without starting any other service.
All suggestions are welcome, including ones that leverage other tools/methods to gather the performance metrics.
Thank you.
Jan Odvarko has written a Tutorial on how to use the new listener functionality within Firebug to log net panel results:
"Since Firebug 1.4a13 the Net panel introduces, among other things, several new events that allow to easily collect all network requests and also related info gathered and computed by Firebug.
This functionality should be useful also in cases where Firebug extensions want to store network activity info into a local database or send it back to the server for further analysis (I am thinking about performance statistics here)."
Take a look at the NetExport extension for FireBug.
Steps:
enable autoexport in preferences( you can automate this one as well)
choose the folder where the data is to be added
Read the file
While it isn't directly a Firebug solution, perhaps something like Jiffy would help?
Jiffy pretty much works like a server based version of Firebug's measurement tools. I haven't used it in anger yet, but it may do what you're looking for?
http://code.google.com/p/jiffy-web/
Jiffy allows developers to:
measure individual pieces of page rendering (script load, AJAX execution, page load, etc.) on every client
report those measurements and other metadata to a web server
aggregate web server logs into a database
generate reports
There is a way to use ySlow to beacon out performance data to a URL of your choice. It's not well documented, the only info I found was here:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/exceptional-performance/messages/490?threaded=1&m=e&var=1&tidx=1
Aside from that I would look into writing a Firebug plugin, I think you can access most Firebug properties. Here's a tutorial: http://www.firephp.org/Reference/Developers/ExtendingFirebug.htm
Ben,
I've done this by extended Selenium RC's ProxyHandler to queue up the URLs seen and then allow you to pull them down via some other API. It requires that you proxy everything, which isn't the default behavior of Selenium. The nice thing is that Selenium ends up being both the place to drive automation and collect the results seen.
This is probably a feature we'll soon add to Selenium RC right after we get 1.0 out the door (we're very close!).
Okay I admit this is not a direct answer but how about going right to the source? Cut out FireBug and go to the web server. Can the server log events with sufficient granularity to allow calculation of the information you require? Parsing the log file into useful data should not be particularly difficult and has the advantage of being user-platform independent and has the potential to log a greater set of data than that offered by FireBug (Awesome tool btw).
Are there any open source (or I guess commercial) packages that you can plug into your site for monitoring purposes? I'd like something that we can hook up to our ASP.NET site and use to provide reporting on things like:
performance over time
current load
page traffic
SQL performance
PU time monitoring
Ideally in c# :)
With some sexy graphs.
Edit: I'd also be happy with a package that I can feed statistics and views of data to, and it would analyse trends, spot abnormal behaviour (e.g. "no one has logged in for the last hour. is this Ok?", "high traffic levels detected", "low number of API calls detected") and generally be very useful indeed. Does such a thing exist?
At my last office we had a big screen which showed us loads and loads of performance counters over a couple of time ranges, and we could spot weird stuff happening, but the data was not stored and there was no way to report on it. Its a package for doing this that I'm after.
It should be noted that google analytics is not an accurate representation of web site usage. This is because the web beacon (web bug) used on the page does not always load for these reasons:
Google analytics servers are called by millions of pages every second and can not always process the requests in a timely fashion.
Users often browse away from a page before the full page has loaded and thus there is not enough time to load Googles web beacon to record a hit.
Google analytics require javascript to be installed which can be disabled.
Quite a few (but not substantial amount) of people block google-analytics.com from their browsers, myself included.
The physical log files are the best 'real' representation of site usage as they record every request. Alternatively there are far better 'professional' packages, of which Omniture is my favourite, which have much better response times, alternative methods for recording actions and more functionality.
If you're after things like server data, would RRDTool be something you're after?
It's not really a webserver type stats program though, I have no idea how it would scale.
Edit:
I've also just found Splunk Swarm, if you're interested in something that looks "cool".
Google Analytics is free (up to 50,000 hits per month I think) and is easy to setup with just a little javascript snippet to insert into your header or footer and has great detailed reports, with some very nice graphs.
Google Analytics is quick to set up and provides more sexy graphs than you can shake a stick at.
http://www.google.com/analytics/
Not Invented here but it's on my todo list to setup.
http://awstats.sourceforge.net/
#Ian
Looks like they've raised the limit. Not very surprising, it is google after all ;)
This free version is limited to 5 million pageviews a month - however, users with an active Google AdWords account are given unlimited pageview tracking.
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55543
http://www.serverdensity.com/
One option is to use external monitoring tools, which will monitor the web performance from outside the firewall by simulating end user activities.
Catchpoint Systems has an interesting approach that requires very little coding and gives you the performance stats from outside the datacenter and from inside the asp.net (like processing time, etc)
http://www.catchpoint.com/products.html