Best tool for measuring loading time of pages?

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Hi,

In the company where I work we are encountering performance issues when loading pages.

Iā€™d like to make an inventory of loading delays for every page. What tool would you recommend ?

Maybe load testing tools like Webload, Loadrunner etc ?

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Iā€™m mostly used to using JMeter (OpenSource, free & easy to use)

What kind of webpage are we talking about? Do you use REST APIā€™s or still SOAP or something else?
Make sure to keep your performance script ā€˜realisticā€™ to ensure correct response-time results.

If you want to go nuts use for example JMeter + TICK Stack: InfluxDB 1.X: Open Source Time Series Platform | InfluxData

  • Telegraph
  • InfluxDB
  • Chronograph (or Grafana)
  • Kapacitor

Insane dashboarding & live followup of your results, highly recommended.

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I red that Jmeter is hard to set up, it could take time, is it true ?

Iā€™d like to test it directly in the GUI and not just API calls.

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I donā€™t think so, itā€™s actually very easy to setup. (TICK Stack is a bit harder to setup)
I donā€™t think you need a lot of technical skills to setup JMeter either.

If you are looking for tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-iAXz8vs48&list=PLyZDoc-Wc-9xCAkzVYDOxB_f4RE_MkPUM&ab_channel=AutomationStepbyStep

This guy explains it all very well

This will be quite difficult in any performance testing tool.
You can do call to retrieve all html, css, etc but ā€¦ reporting will look dirty.

I would advise to start testing your APIā€™s. Because if your UI loads slow you still wonā€™t know if itā€™s due to the API or UI.

I donā€™t know how many users you wish to simulate of course but I can imagine if you want to simulate 10.000 users, you wonā€™t want to spin up 10.000 browsers :stuck_out_tongue:

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Yes I understand that testing in the UI is less relevant, but the need of the company is more like from a user point of view. Basically they just want to know what pages takes more than 4 seconds to be loaded.

I agree with you that using the API is the proper way but actually they want to measure the UI performance too.

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You can always test it manually and look at the response times in Developer Tools.
What sometimes happens is that you use JMeter to set load on the web app with 100-10.000 users and then you go manually through the UI while there is a bigger load.

But yea it will never be a proper result :confused:

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Like Kist mentioned, with JMeter you would have the most control of what you can check.

But, if you want to start of with something easy (and more visual, since JMeter can see a bit overwhelming with all of itā€™s options) just try the Lighhouse from the dev tools to get a general idea:

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Here are a few more web-based services which offer similar insight:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

PS the MoT Club website seem really performant :smiley:

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Have a look at this tool. It would provide some insight on how the page is in diferent areas.

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Thank you guys for all these answers. I saw different tools like ā€œFast or Slowā€ but actually when you have to test a softwareā€™s company with real login/pw I think we need different tools like Jmeter, isnā€™t it ?

Basically we have to be able to run a real scenario where you navigate into pages or you call API, not just ping a public page like where we are right now :smiley:

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Subject7 can do that! Let me know if you want to learn more, or check out our website here! Software Testing Automation Tool Demo

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11

In the past I coordinated performance tests with LoadRunner and JMeter.

LoadRunner is an expensive tool, but it has also a lot of features. For a normal load test and stress test this tool can provide a lot of information.

JMeter is a cheap tool for a load test. It has less features than LoadRunner, but it might be suitable for a small test.

The most difficult part of the performance test is to interpret the data. Suppose the load time of a page is 5 seconds. What is the bottleneck?

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In my opinion, there is no tool better than Apache Jmeter to use when you need to work on load tests.

Being VP Delivery and Operations, at Software Testing Company here is the blog that may help you better understand JMeter Tool: Introduction to JMeter & How to View JMeter Test Results in Real-time?

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Depends what you are looking to do?

To monitor production systems with synthetic checks, pingdom, speedcurve, wepagetest, or gmetrics are not a bad idea.

For performance testing prior to release Iā€™ve been moving teams away to jmeter to k6. See my testbash talk next month as to why.

You might also consider an APM solution (newrlic) or analytics (google analytics, amplitude) for real user metrics .

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If youā€™re experiencing universal delays, Iā€™d say that focusing on performance not under load might be your best bet to start with. Mainly because itā€™s the low-hanging fruit, and you donā€™t have to get into complicated discussions about acceptable load and delays and time of day and yadda yadda.

I really like Lighthouseā€™s approach; knowing what components of page loading are slowest helps figure out what to address. Itā€™s also possible to run it from CI.

Also, and Iā€™m biased because I work there, Sauce Labsā€™ front end performance testing is pretty great :sweat_smile:. It gives you similar response breakdowns as Lighthouse, and breaks things down: What calls are taking the longest, is page performance based on rendering or asset fetching or server waits etc. It also automatically establishes a baseline of performance and tells you over time if your site drops below the baseline, for commit-to-commit monitoring.

If you already have existing Selenium scripts, gathering data just requires you to run them via Sauce Labs and add a couple of desired capabilities. You can then use the REST API to download the results.

I agree with @crunchy that adding APM or analytics might be helpful as well; it sounds like this is causing a business impact, so being able to quantify that will help decide what kind of spend you want to do on the process.

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What kind of pages?
What sort of application are the pages part of?
What does ā€˜encountering performance issuesā€™ mean? page unreachable, page load time out, page stutters at display, page loads partially, page loads fine but in a time thatā€™s longer than desired, users encounter display issues when browsing it?
Is your ā€˜pageā€™ within the ā€˜appā€™ distributed across multiple device types or configurations? Would you have to narrow down some specific states?
Is the performance issue constant or randomly showing up? Does it show when some specific content is called/retrieved/processes/displayed?
Is it server-side hardware, network firewall, some slow external provider, overload of the internal systemā€¦

Without knowing anything about your problem, application, and its potential location, itā€™s hard to recommend a tool.

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Hi @ipstefan,

I meant measuring the load time of every page of our software, simple URL pages with PHP code behind.
Current issues are more related to the fact that some pages take too much time and some users are frustrated.
Consequently I would like to know what url take more than X seconds to be loaded, then we will investigate.

Load test tools maybe are too much complicated for this purpose and simple tools like Pingdom canā€™t login into the app and navigate into pages, so maybe something in the middle could fit.
Iā€™m going to try a tool proposed by Datadog. They donā€™t provide load testing but it could be enough in order to get simple metrics on load time.

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Load testing is one of the most significant aspects of performance testing a website. Though there are large number of tools available in the market, me being associated with a Quality Assurance brand would recommend:

JMeter

LoadRunner

Load Ninja

Eggplant

NeoLoad

As most modern businesses operate on Agile practices, here is a quick link that you might find helpful for running load tests in an agile environment.

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18

Speeding up websites and application are essential in these competitive times and for that one needs load and performance testing services along with black box testing. Performance monitoring is a process to know how fast your website loads. Data gathered from Website Speed tools helps to improve web page speed and increase user engagement while reducing bounce rate. Following are some tools to do the same:

  1. Site24X7 : It is a SaaS-based-all-in-one solution for DevOps and IT. It will monitor the performance and uptime of websites and other internet services like DNS server, FTP server, REST APIs etc.

  2. ManageEngine Applications Manager : It enables you to perform web page analysis, keep track of your web pages, detect slow performance by monitoring the page load time, and optimize web page performance using PageSpeed rules and suggestions. It will monitor the performance of a single webpage or sequence of webpages.

  3. Web Performance Monitor : It is a tool that enables you to understand SQLs with ease. This application helps you to optimize your database, queries, and indexes.

  4. Performance : It is an online tool that measures how long it takes to connect to your site and for one page to load fully. This will test performance of your sites from any countries.

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