Track page size of web app for performance

Question

I'm about to start trialling optimisations on my web application (apache & tomcat). My main interest right now is:

• The total page size (including external js files such as jquery)
• The number of GETs per page

I'd like to setup a systematic way of measuring the consequences of the various changes I make over time.

Are there any tools that are useful for recording a sequence of page hits, playing this back (as I change the config) and record the size of each page ? Ideally I'd like something that can make work with a continuous integration server such as Continuum.

Rgds, Kevin.

Answer 1

Instead or in additon to monitoring the page size I suggest to optimize for performance.

So monitor the page load time and idealy also your web app's transaction performance. If you google for "real browser monitoring" you will see a some providers like AlertFox.

Another totally free option is to run the performance monitoring locally with iMacros, Google Page speed,Selenium...

Google page speed also gives you page size and # of gets ;-)

Answer 2

You can use :

In Chrome:

• Google Chrome Developer Tools, directly in the browser (no need to install).
  • [menu] ⇒ Tools ⇒ Developer Tools (what you are looking for is in the Resources Panel)
• Google Speed Tracer, but be careful with it: you need to use an unstable version of Chrome, and I've stopped to use it because of that.

In Firefox

• Firebug
  • Take a look to the Net Panel
• Google Page Speed
• Yahoo! YSlow

Answer 3

The other answers are useful, but they don't allow me to do the measurements I want to do in a repeatable, automated, systematic way. After some more researching, this is a multi part problem. I will need to

• Use the Firebug plugin, and the YSlow plugin. YSlow will send a beacon to me containing stats

• Setup a server to receive, collect & report on these results

• Automate Firefox running against my web app from my continuous integration server.