YSlow is an awesome tool. One thing I would recommend as a feature request would be to have a more verbose reporting component. Incidentally, there is a tool that was released not too long ago by a developer on the Exceptional Performance mailing list. It is called PageTest. Furthermore, PageTest uses the YSlow criteria for Exceptional Performance. In addition, PageTest allows you to export the report into an Excel spreadsheet.
The only real drawback to using PageTest is its speed (contradiction? I think so, heh). It is a definite work in progress, but it has the baseline functionality that you need as a web developer to deconstruct your web application’s performance levels. There is always room for improvement, such as, sexifying the UI. An awesome feature would be to have the ability to save a performance testing report, like day X, and then 10 days later after re-factoring your code, you can run a performance test again and then do a comparison between the two reports. The delta would show exactly how much your application benefited, whether it be size (KBs), or load times (ms).
On the whole, web developers should be pushing the limits of their applications in terms of performance. The average user will not use a dog-slow application. Concordantly, web developers should always be thinking about how to balance out the three elements that make a rich internet application–Performance, functionality, and user experience. With PageTest, a web developer will have a much easier time in making decisions to balance out performance, functionality, and user experience because PageTest clearly points out the application’s performance pitfalls.
Patrick Meenan wrote,
FYI, the test results from pagetest are available indefinetly. You can either bookmark the results and go back to do the comparison or there is also a test history if you just want to locate previous runs (link to the test history is directly below the url entry field).
Not sure if you’re looking for slower or faster with the speed but if you switch to “First View only” it’ll cut the test time in half by only running one test. There’s also the desktop version which is a browser plugin if you prefer it to be interactive (http://pagetest.sourceforge.net) but that is restricted to whatever your connectivity is and you’ll have to clear you cookies and cache manually (things the web version take care of for you).
Feel free to submit feature requests through sourceforge and I’ll slot them as I get time.
-Pat
| Link | June 5th, 2008 at 4:26 pm