Performance Profiling Using HTTP Watch
Posted: December 30th, 2009 | Author: TnT Admin | Filed under: Tools | Tags: Bottleneck, firefox, internet explorer, plugins, profiling, web | No Comments »
If you need to profile the performance of your web page, HTTPWatch is the tool (plugin) you can count on to do it. With HTTPWatch, not only can you determine the load time of the web page (web performance profiling), you can also determine the time taken for loading each individual object. Through this you can determine if there are bottlenecks or under-optimized setting for the web server and apply the corrective resolution to it.
HTTPWatch is like a traffic sniffer (they termed it traffic viewer). Once you start a recording a session, you can view almost anything that is sent via the browser, such as the HTTP headers, the response code, cookies, any caching used, methods, redirections, compression, encoding, and authentication.
What I like most out of the available information is the header, status codes, errors, cookies, redirections and compression. HTTPWatch can view the following:
- Header – Is a valid header being sent from the client and if the server is returning a valid header as well?
- Status Codes – What is the status code returning? Is it giving me a correct HTTP 200 or something else (e.g. 302, 404) that may cause degradation of the client side performance? Note: HTTP codes other than 200 may degrade the web server as well.
- Cookies – Are cookies under-performing? Are the cookies being retrieved correctly? Having cookies expired or should they be made to expired?
- Redirections – Are unnecessary redirections made due to invalid requests to invalid objects or missing objects that were removed (e.g. 404 errors)?
- Compression – Have all HTTP requests made from the client returned in compression thus decreasing the throughput?
The plugin can be installed for both Internet Explorer and Firefox users. There is a free version readily available to download which is sufficient for you to conduct most performance troubleshooting and fix problems on the web server. The problem with HTTP Watch is that it needs to install in to the system, and this can be considered intrusive if your organisation or your client has a policy against installation of non-compliance software. It has a Firefox version which means you can use a portable version of Firefox with HTTPWatch installed with it. This is a workaround against the policy. Personally, I have a preference over YSlow (another HTTP sniffer/viewer in Firefox portable) than HTTPWatch as it has a cleaner interface (in my opinion).
You can use HTTPWatch if you need to profile one single user for your web application and considering not using a stop watch (at least it’s more professional than a stopwatch technique in your client’s opinion).
Click here to download HTTPWatch!