WebPagetest Forums

There are several things on my "to do" list for WebPagetest and I figured who better to help decide what is most important than the users. I can't guarantee that I'll work on things in the order voted because I'll have to weigh it against what we need internally as well but it will strongly influence the direction.

Here's the current list (roughly in the order I was going to work on them):

Compare multiple tests against each other: Initially by selecting multiple tests from the test history but eventually other ways to select the tests to compare. You'll get a bunch of stacked bar charts for times, requests, bytes, etc. After the basics are done then interleaved waterfalls will also be attempted.

Zoom in on waterfall: At the top of the details page you'll be able to "zoom" into the render, dom, doc complete or fully loaded times which will only show the requests that had activity during that time and will change the horizontal scale as well. Eventually it will also support an arbitrary min and max (which could also be useful for having a fixed time scale when looking at 2 different waterfalls). This should make it easier for getting useful waterfalls for presentations.

Simpler optimization results: On the main results page, instead of showing a thumbnail of the optimization checklist, display a simple table that indicates which checks did well and which didn't (probably with a better indication of the "critical" and "less important" checks). The optimization checklist would also be grouped by "critical", "important" and "nice to have"

Custom Headers and Cookies: The ability to specify custom http headers and cookies to be used for a test.

Commenting on tests: At a minimum, when submitting a test you'll be able to add a note about what the test is for and it'll show up in the history as well as when looking at the results. Not sure about letting comments be added after a test was run

Add more optimization checks: Incorporate more of the checks that YSlow and Page Speed do into pagetest.

Improve the documentation: The current wiki on sourceforge is pretty lame (and sourceforge locked it down when they stopped supporting wikis). This would cover documentation for pagetest, webpagetest, urlblast and the optimization checks

I would appreciate a variable download speed motivated by having a target market in a developing country with very slow internet access, yes slower than 56kbps.

Thanks for a wonderful tool though!!!

I would like to see packet loss, please, per request and/or initial connection - though I realise that this may be quite hard as wininet hides this away.

Thanks for what you have implemented though.

FWIW, I do have TCP retransmits over the life of the page load (as well as packet transmits so you can calculate a rate). It's in the raw page data (link in the top-right of the results page). That will at least tell you if you had any packet loss during the test but not on which connection. It doesn't detect inbound packet loss but that's a lot harder to detect, even with raw access to the packets.

On the (very long) list of things to do is to capture the packets from a test which will allow better analysis (and more accurate timings on the network-view of the traffic).

Great (though that .csv is coming through empty for me at the moment.)

I also like the CPU graph very much. I was wondering whether we can have an upstream/downstream bandwidth utilitisation graph?

We're a long way to go on our site, but I have an idea that if I can get close to max-ing the customer's bandwidth then I feel we're getting close to 'finishing'.

Also, if we are maxing uplink bandwidth then I know I need to look at ripping out extraneous bloat in the requests (cookies and the like). It also might help me deciding parallelisation strategy...

Thanks again

Neil

I have downlink bandwidth. Uplink is a lot harder to capture since you don't necessarily know when the data actually left (and it's not necessarily a bottleneck). Hopefully will be adding it in a few days (need to play with how it looks in the chart).

I'll take a look at the csv's. I must have broken something (coming through blank for me as well).

Thanks,

-Pat

csv's should be fixed now. Sorry about that.

-Pat

Hi Pat,

tell you what would *really* help me: the ability to specify cookies to be sent by urlblast....

All the best

Neil

It's been on the list and shouldn't be too hard to implement. I'll see if I can get a few spare cycles over then next week or so to crank it out.

Firefox support

There can be large differences between the performance of IE and Firefox. JS can have a large speed difference, how the page is rendered etc.

I would love to be able to compare the same page in IE7 / IE8 / FF3 / FF3.5

Regardless great work as always.

Thanks
Steve