The the average loading time of your website is crucial, especially for the landing page.
If it is less than 3 seconds, you shall be happy; if over 10 seconds, you’re doom.
Usually loading a webpage takes below sequential stages:
- Dns lookup
- Initial connections: tcp connect
- Receive data: such as css, js, images, etc
- Render the page: build up html DOM elements
- Async loading: ajax or some parallel download
webpagetest is my favorite test tool: http://www.webpagetest.org
Though it might look a bit ugly, it’s powerful. It supports:
- Choose test location
- Choose user agent: simulate mobile visitors or computer ones, firefox or chrome, etc.
- Detail breakdown for how time spends in different stages.
- Performance review and tuning suggestions
pingdom is a bit similar like webpagetest: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
It has a much better UI, while less powerful.
Local test by GUI*: Firefox Add-on YSlow from Yahoo should be a treasure for you.
It not only show how time is spent, but also detail suggestions for how to improve.
Local test by CLI*. Below are some command lines to get a rough performance statistics.
wbench https://www.dennyzhang.com
time wget -E -H -k -K -p https://www.dennyzhang.com
ab -i -n 100 -c 5 https://www.dennyzhang.com
The most accurate tool above is wbench: https://github.com/desktoppr/wbench.
wbench will automatically launch chrome multiple times, to figure out how time is spent.
Note: chromedriver in CentOS6 or before is no longer supported by google.
You may need some extra effort, if you want to try wbench in that kind of server.
What’s up, just wanted to mention, I enjiyed this
post. It was helpful. Keep on posting!
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