SiteTimer debugs slow-loading pages

SiteTimer from OctaGate loads a URL you give it and tracks how many milliseconds it took to connect, request, load the first byte and load the last byte of every single element of your Web site. It produces a graph of all the components with their respective load times, which could be used for debugging the slow sites. One caveat though: it does not attempt to interpret the JavaScript, it simply records the time it took to load the script.

They also have a few pointers if you find your site on a slow side of their graphs:

* Use JPG instead of GIF or BMP. Sometimes PNG files are smaller than JPG files
* Use harder compression on your jpg images
* Make the images smaller in size
* Reduce the number of images
* Use HTTP compression on your web servers, which may compress code/text by up to 90%

Posted Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 under Optimization, Programming.
  • http://notbrainsurgery.livejournal.com/ Vadim

    The problem with tools like this is that they produce unrealistic results. I was recently optimizing some page load, and you really have to do this testging in various browsers. Number of simultaneous connections, order of elements load, use of HTTP 1.1 persistent connections, etc. – this all depends on your browser version and settings.

  • Alex

    For a, let’s say, large content site, this tool could allow the developers to see that, for example, an external image ad is taking too long to load, therefore slowing down the entire page.