What good tool or website should I use to test the performance of a webpage / website?

Question

What is a good tool or website for testing web page / site performance? I am trying to find a good basis for determining how fast my page will load on one hosting provider against another. I originally used http://www.freespeedtest.com/ , but wanted to get opinions and links for others.

Answer 1

I use Firefox with FireBug and YSlow plugins installed.

Answer 2

I use this to measure page size and the number of HTTP requests required: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

I use Pingdom to measure the average response time of my website.

Answer 3

For simple basic testing, use ab (ApacheBench) or httperf.

Pingdom is very useful for initial analysis of a specific page and measuring the response of a site. However, this is not a load verification tool.

To do this, you need to turn to commercial tools. Here are a few options:

• Main
• Gomez strong text
• Loadrunner

I also recently tested Load Impact, and it seemed like a good basic tool.

Finally, there is a fairly complete list of options. http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html#LOAD

Answer 4

Here are a few of them that I use:

http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/speedtester.html (this detail is pretty detailed)

http://www.vertain.com/?sst (very fast and easy speed test)

http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test (Another simple speed test)

Answer 5

The YSlow addin for Firefox is very good for helping you tune the performance as well as the NET Firebug tab.

Answer 6

Firebug with YSlow is a fairly common combination. Google also has PageTest , which is another plugin that works with Firebug. It has several different rules and such, but is still very similar to YSlow. I like to use both tools for initial testing, as they can provide very simple and quick results.

After you start optimizing and want to see how performance changes, I would recommend using Pagetest . It provides a web interface for YSlow, like results / performance analysis, as well as really beautiful waterfall graphs to see where time is wasted. Perhaps the two most useful things in Pagetest are: 1) it allows you to easily perform several tests and 2) gives clear results for cold and hot cache files. I found that multiple trials are the only real way to get realistic results, there are just too many differences in individual trials.

Answer 7

I tried all of these tools and finally came across the "Net Export" plugin for Firebug. Now I use the NET tab of Firebug to track the performance of my site, and I can export it to . Har format to view later as an archive. I can use .har archives as baselines and then use more "persist" traces and then compare them visually later.