The LoadComplete Top 10 Report
Everybody likes a good website performance train wreck. Actually nobody likes a slow website, but it’s a good example for my favorite LoadComplete feature, the Top 10 report. The Top 10 report is a hit-list of the 10 slowest pages and responses encountered while testing a website. The Top 10 also details individual requests holding up your parade. A few of the worst offenders are:
- Large, improperly sized images stored remotely that must download and then require additional time to re-size.
- Redirection to ad providers that eat additional seconds while media or JavaScript load from other domains.
- Social media widgets such as Google or Tweet buttons generate extra requests.
- Analytics references, such as Google Analytics may be relatively fast, but still add load time.
Take a look at the example Top 10 report below. The major headings in the Top 10 report show Slow Pages and Slow Responses. Underneath the bar graph, an outline list of Scenarios expand to show the individual requests and responses that cause the page to load slowly. To gather the data for this example report, I used LoadComplete to record a few websites that are known to be a bit pokey.
Expand a Scenario node to see each requested style sheet, script and image (see screenshot below). The waterfall graph on the right shows how long each request takes (blue), how long the server thinks about the request (green) and how long it takes the server to hustle all that data back to the browser (red). Look at the graph detail to determine if the server is taking too long to process the request or if network bottlenecks are holding up the response.
Note: I also like to see at-a-glance if I’m waiting for scripts to load at the top of the page instead of deferring script loading to the end of the page.
Hover the mouse over any request to view the hint window. The screenshot below shows that it took 811 milliseconds to receive the first byte of typeography2.php and 343 milliseconds to transfer the response.
Note: The Time to First Byte is the time between the first byte of the user request leaving and the first byte of the server response arriving.
Stay tuned for blogs on using LoadComplete to record and perform load and stress testing. You can try out LoadComplete here. Get training for SmartBear LoadComplete and TestComplete here.
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