Hammerhead – Measure pageload time in Firefox and export your findings to CSV
A big day in the web optimisation space tool, we have a second new tool to help web developers in the quest for faster web pages. Mr YSlow Steve Sounders has just released a new tool – Hammerhead.
Here is Steve’s explanation behind the rational for the tool
* real user data – I love real user metrics. JavaScript frameworks like Jiffy measure page load times from real traffic. When your site is used by a large, diverse audience, data from real page views is ground-truth.
* bucket testing – When you’re getting ready to push a new release, if you’re lucky you can do bucket testing to gather performance metrics. You release the new code to a subset of users while maintaining another set of users on the old code (the “control”). If you sample your user population correctly and gather enough data, comparing the before and after timing information gives you a preview of the latency impact of your next release.
* synthetic or simulated testing – In some situations, it’s not possible to gather real user data. You might not have the infrastructure to do bucket testing and real user instrumentation. Your new build isn’t ready for release, but you still want to gauge where you are with regard to performance. Or perhaps you’re measuring your competitors’ performance. In these situations, the typical solution is to do scripted testing on some machine in your computer lab, or perhaps through a service like Keynote or Gomez.
* dev box – The first place performance testing happens (or should happen) is on the developer’s box. As she finishes her code changes, the developer can see if she made things better or worse. What was the impact of that JavaScript rewrite? What happens if I add another stylesheet, or split my images across two domains?
I’ve done a quick test of ZoomIn from our crimped broadband at home. And I can already see that we have some work to sort out page load time.
I’ve been after a tool that will measure page loadtime and exports out to a data file. A big thanks to Steve for the tool.