Friday, July 11, 2008

Pagetest Optimization Tutorial

Dave Artz put together a great tutorial on using pagetest (the web version) for optimizing sites. It's fairly lengthy but well worth the time to make sure you get the most out of the tool:

http://www.artzstudio.com/2008/07/optimizing-web-performance-with-aol-pagetest/

8 comments:

  1. very cool - looks similar to loadrunner and yslow.

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  2. Great tool!

    Any plans to release the source of the web version of pagetest? It certainly would be useful at my company.

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  3. It's "on the list" to do but there are a few hard coded things I want to clean up first. The setup is also quite a bit more complicated than the installing of the desktop version (requiring a dedicated windows box to do the testing) and it gets SIGNIFICANTLY more complicated if you want to do the traffic shaping (requiring a separate device in front of the test equipment).

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  4. I too, can't wait to see the webpagetest version of this made available. I'd like to get it integrated to our Continuous Integration cycle :)

    I'm also curious as to when/if the standalone version will get the connection pipes feature that you've added to the web version.

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  5. Ping me directly (PatMeenan@aol.com) if you want to stand up a version of webpagetest yourself. There are 3-4 people that have done it already (for use inside of their company generally).

    I'm still not happy enough with the code and configuration for a wide general release but it's worked fine for everyone who has done it so far.

    One benefit you get if you stand up a private version is you can submit test requests directly as GET requests (I have it blocked on the public version because of spam problems) which makes integration with QA and dev a lot easier.

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  6. Oh, and it'll probably be quite a while before I can add the "connection view" display to the stand-alone version. That was implemented completely in PHP on the server side and would take a fair amount of time to add to the desktop code.

    It's not off the list but honestly I have so many other things to do still that it probably won't happen for quite a while.

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  7. Actually, if you pay veeeeery close attention (i found out) this info IS available in the stand alone version.

    When you select an item, it will highlight (very faintly) items further in the list that used the same connection pipe.

    At least, that's what I think it's doing :)

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  8. Yes, that's what it's doing. You just don't get the visualization where you can see all of the connections grouped at once.

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