Measuring Web Performance

We talk a lot at Velocity and in our WebPerf Meetup groups about “web page performance” but how do we measure web page performance?

There are multiple different techniques to collect the data and multiple different metrics to collect. In this presentation we’ll cover all of the commonly used measurement techniques and talk about their strengths and weakness from the different perspectives of Development, QA and Web Operations. We’ll look at some real-world data and talk about the different metrics you can, and can’t, collect with each measurement technique and what you gain, and lose, as you move from raw data to statistical measures like averages through to summary metrics like Apdex.

We’ll dive into the “Synthetic versus Real-User debate” that’s been featured on blogs like WebPerformanceToday.com and present a framework to conceptualise the difference between synthetic and real-user performance measurement and why both of them should have a place in your web performance measurement toolbox.

The goal is to give you a decision tree to enable you to ensure that you are using the right measurement technique, to collect the right metrics, at the right stage in your software development lifecycle and out in the “real world” of WebOps.