October 2011 Monthly Meeting Summary
Topic:
Measuring and Optimizing Website Performance - presentation by Patrick Meenan, Google Inc.
Patrick discussed various aspects of a website that can impact performance, techniques for measuring
them accurately and some of the techniques for improving performance. Topics covered were to include:
* Back-end vs. Front-end performance
* Pitfalls of synthetic testing
* Real-User Monitoring
* Upcoming browser enhancements
Presenter Bio:
Patrick Meenan created WebPagetest, a free online website
speed test service, while at AOL and now works at Google with a team that is working to make the web
faster. He has been working on optimizing low-level networking performance for various applications
(among other responsibilities) over the last 15 years. Patrick blogs at
blog.patrickmeenan.com
Took place on: Wed. October 12 2011 6:30 PM
Attendance: 19
Meeting Notes:
- During the discussion it was initially noted that performance testing is not the same as load testing
- Webpagetest supports IE, Firefox, Chrome but only on Windows. Does not support Safari.
- It was noted that performance behavior measured via a proxy such as Fiddler or Charles can be quite different than without a proxy.
- It was mentioned that Dynatrace is a good performance analyzer for javascript/Ajax
- NewRelic is another tool for performance analytics
- Window.performance.timing - part of DOM for IE9, Chrome, Firefox 7 helps gather all kinds ot timing info from the browser; is utilized by Google Analytics
- Google Webmaster Tools obtains info from browsers using the Google Toolbar
- Webpagetest can do videos of a page load and can show side-by-side videos
- Webpagetest can handle scripting, authentication
- Blaze Mobitest was mentioned - for testing website performance on a mobile device
- A slideshare presentation from the meeting is available:
http://www.slideshare.net/patrickmeenan/web-performance-testing-9694040.
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