Since early this year ive been working on and off on an analytics script for personal use (may make it commercial service … dunno) . Due to time constraints i haven’t been coding for last 2 - 3 months, but now am ready to start work on it again.
Patrick’s post was a major encouragement re-affirming that there is a market for such services.
But the question is how can one really measure the performance?
My current method is very lame… i.e. it saves the time in a javascript variable, compares that to the time after onLoad and reports that back. This does not account server delays for the base page.
Boomerang by Yahoo helps solve this by setting timestamps in cookies and checks that on the next pageload, but this helps measure basepage time only if there is > 1 pageview/session. The bounced sessions wont be measured.
Just wondering if there is a more elegant way to monitor the complete pageload time? Anyone have any interesting tricks up their sleeves?
I promise to give free beta access (provided I have something launchable) to people who can point me in the right direction
IE9 and the latest Chrome builds have vendor-specific implementations while the kinks are worked out but that is the real solution. Until then it’s basically a case of doing the best you can with what you have. The base page is easily mined from your access logs so I generally see it as not being a problem but something people need to be aware of.
Interesting, had read about the webtiming api but didnt think that browsers were actually implementing it… maybe i should play with boomerang and make it do the client side stuff … one less thing to develop and maintain…
True that server side performance can be easily (and automatically) mined… tested… etc… but would be nice to have a complete solution…
FWIW, it’s on the to-do (or at least wishlist) for boomerang so contributing to that would probably be better for the community - instead of having multiple tools to sort through.
