Master List of tools

Here is a list of web performance testing tools (in alphabetical order). I’ll seed it with the list I know of but if there are more that you are aware of please let me know and I can add them to the list.

Online Testing

Free Services
Dotcom-Monitor Instant – Instant full-page tests, IE, Chrome, Firefox, multiple locations, full report
GTmetrix – Performance and Optimization check (YSlow and Page Speed)
KITE (Keynote) – IE 7 from 5 cities across the globe
Load Impact Page Analyzer – Simulated Browser
Page Speed Online – Online Page Speed check
Pingdom full page test – Simulated Browser
Show Slow – Trended YSlow and Pagespeed results
Site-Perf – Simulated browser, multiple locations
WebPagetest – IE 6-9 and Chrome from multiple locations
Yottaa – Performance and optimization trending
Zoompf – Site crawler that checks for optimization
WebSiteOptimization Speed Report – Simulated browser, provides performance and optimization suggestionns

Subscription Services
Catchpoint
Gomez
Keynote
Webmetrics

Desktop Software
dynaTrace Ajax Edition – Free, IE Only, Windows, Javascript profiler
HTTPWatch – Commercial, Free Trial. Windows, all browsers
KITE – Keynote’s desktop testing utility. Free, Windows, IE only
Page Speed (Google) – Free, Firefox and Chrome, All Platforms
Page Detailer (IBM) – Free, Windows, All Browsers
Pagetest – Free, IE Only, Windows
Performance Tracker (MySpace) – Free, IE Only, Windows
YSlow (Yahoo) – Free, Firefox and Chrome, All platforms

Hi Patrick,

Great forum – thanks for creating this for all of us! Say hi to the team!

Keynote – Free on-demand tests from 5 locations, subscription

May I suggest this would be:

KITE – Keynote’s free on-demand tests from 5 cities and your desktop (no subscription required – free)

Technically, KITE is also desktop software. And the link is http://kite.keynote.com

Vik

pmeenan:

Here is a list of web performance testing tools. I’ll seed it with the list I know of but if there are more that you are aware of please let me know and I can add them to the list.

Online Testing
WebPagetest – Free
WebPagetest NZ – Free
Pingdom full page test – Free
Keynote – Free on-demand tests from 5 locations, subscription
Gomez – Subscription

Desktop Software
Pagetest – Free, Windows, IE only
YSlow – Free, Firefox (IE Soon), All platforms
IBM Page Detailer – Free, Windows, All Browsers
HTTPWatch – Commercial, Free Trial. Windows, all browsers

Hi Patrick,

Great forum – thanks for creating this for all of us! Say hi to the team!

Keynote – Free on-demand tests from 5 locations, subscription

May I suggest this would be:

KITE – Keynote’s free on-demand tests from 5 cities and your desktop (no subscription required – free)

Technically, KITE is also desktop software. And the link is http://kite.keynote.com

Vik

Thanks Vik. I updated and broke things out a little more and put KITE into the different sections where it was applicable. Let me know if you want things tweaked any.

-Pat

rbhogi October 8, 2009, 2:56am 5

Are there any tools (web or desktop) to find out how much time it’s taking to render above fold for a given web page?

None that work well that I’m aware of. Gomez offers a Visual Complete measurement that measures when all of the objects above the fold have finished loading but it works best for static pages and I’m not sure how well it deals with DHTML. I have been debating adding a similar measurement to Pagetest but most of the sites I work with are a lot more dynamic and it wouldn’t help much.

One thing we do that works well but is fairly manual is to record a video of the page load and just mark the frame when everything is complete.

ntang October 16, 2009, 12:36am 7

Don’t forget Google Pagespeed:

Google Developers

Make the Web Faster | Google Developers

Tools and information to help you build high performance web sites.

Also, MySpace Performance Tracker:
http://msfast.myspace.com/[hr]
Oh, and in commercial/ subscription products:

Webmetrics:

neustarsecurityservices.com

Website Performance Management Solutions

Neustar offers website performance management solutions to help find and fix problems that can plaque your customer journey . Test your site today!

There are a bunch of others I’ve got bookmarked at work, but I’m at home now…[hr]
MSFast comes pretty close to that – it’s not ideal but can give you a pretty good idea, it shows snapshots of every stage of rendering, so you can just see when the page looks complete in the snapshot and then check what point it’s at.

pmeenan October 16, 2009, 12:49pm 8

Thanks – been a while since the list was updated

Hi
Well,Thanks for giving such a nice information regarding online testing tool.You have create a good awareness among others regarding these topic.I like your article very much.I want to add my knowledge regarding Benefits of this tool.You are truly knowledge giver and thanks once again for these information.

Thanks

p83822 December 11, 2009, 8:57am 10

I like Spirent Avalanche’s http generator (though it is not desktop – it is a racked device and it is certainly not cheap!)

Normally it is used as a load test tool, however, I mention it because:

It allows simulation of multiple subnets with differing network characteristics. In both directions it allows the user to specify:

bandwidth
latency
packet loss

it also allows one to specify whether or not resources are parallelisable and to specify maximum client tcp connections and maximum requests per connection.

This is great for ‘trying stuff out’.

gasyoun December 25, 2009, 1:02pm 11

Are you sure about the IE soon part of Sounder’s YSlow and how many eons more it will take?
http://pagetest.getrpo.com/ not loading for me in FF3.

pmeenan December 25, 2009, 2:31pm 12 gasyoun:

Are you sure about the IE soon part of Sounder’s YSlow and how many eons more it will take?
http://pagetest.getrpo.com/ not loading for me in FF3.

Thanks. We rolled the NZ testing into the main site and I forgot to clean up the link here.

Souders doesn’t work at Yahoo anymore – YSlow was taken over by a team there and they are actively working on it. They were supposed to be working on a version that would work with IE but I haven’t seeen any activity on it for well over a year so I pulled out that comment.

Thanks,

-Pat

If you are behind some proxy which disables gzip headers, its difficult to check if resources are properly compressed.
Here is a tool which makes it easy GIDZipTest: Web Page Compression (Deflate / Gzip) Test – GIDNetwork

pmeenan December 28, 2009, 2:18pm 14

FWIW, the hosted pagetest instances are not behind proxies so you will see whatever the server responds with here as well.

jklein April 16, 2010, 7:43pm 15

I just found http://zoompf.com/ the other day – it’s pretty aggressive in the sense that it will crawl your CSS files and warn you about paths in them that don’t actually apply to any pages (among other things), but it provides another perspective and another way to look at load time metrics.

-Jonathan

Thanks. Just added it to the list. Looks like there may be some gotcha’s with using it but more information is always a good thing.

jklein April 16, 2010, 8:08pm 17

I also noticed that Speed Tracer for Chrome isn’t mentioned. While it’s not quite as easy as a FF addon to set up, I’ve found it useful to find hot spots and get a really drilled down view of what’s going on as your page renders.

Thanks. Also added dynaTrace Ajax edition. The list hadn’t gotten any love for a while and there has been quite a bit of progress on tools.

In your list with Pingdom, I would add : http://site-perf.com/

jklein April 19, 2010, 3:40pm 20 ExKwhanDo: