Tag Archives: Performance

Google’s Chrome User Experience Data in WebPageTest

This article assumes that you know the basics of AWS, WebPageTest, SSH, and at least one linux text editor.

Chrome User Experience Report logo + WebPageTest Logo + Core Web Vitals' LCP thresholds. Quite a busy hero image, I'll admit.

When talking to people about website performance stats, I’ll usually split it into Real User Metrics (RUM) and Automated (Synthetic/Test Lab):

  • RUM is performance data reported from the website you own, reported into the analytics tool you have integrated.
  • Automated are scripted tests that you run from your own performance testing tool against any website you like.

RUM is great: you get real performance details from real user devices and can investigate the difference in performance for many different options.

For example, iPhone vs Android, Mac vs Windows, Mobile vs Desktop, Chrome vs Firefox, UK vs US, even down to ISP and connection type, in order to see who is getting a good experience and who can be improved.

This data is invaluable in prioritising performance improvements, since you can tie it back to the approximate number of users it will affect, and therefore the impact on your business.

There are loads of vendors who can provide this for you (I’ve used many of them), or you can write your own – if you’re a glutton for punishment (and high AWS bills – ask me how I know…😁)

However, since this is measured on your own website and reported into your own tooling, you can only see such real-world performance detail for your own website; no real-world user experience data from your competitors.

Automated tests are great: you get detailed measurements of any website you can access – your own or competitors, or basically any website – in a repeatable fashion so that you can track changes over time.

You can have as many automated tests as you like, you can test from wherever you’re able to set up a test agent, and with whatever device you’re able to automate or emulate.

However, since these are all automated tests running because you said so, you can’t use them to understand how users are using your site, on which devices, what devices are underperforming others, and from where.

Again, there are a load of vendors who can provide this for you; writing your own is a bit more of a headache though – I wouldn’t recommend it, especially while wpt continues to be free for self hosting.

What if you could get some of the usual key performance metrics you’re used to with RUM, but for sites you don’t own such as your competitors?

In this article I’ll talk about the Google Chrome User Experience dataset and how to use it in your performance test setup to find the intersection of RUM and Automated performance test results, wiring it all up into your WebPageTest setup! Continue reading →

WebPageTest Private Instance: 2021 Edition

Catchpoint's WebPageTest

The fantastic WebPageTest, free to use and public, has been available to set up your own private instances for many years; I wrote this up a while back, and scripted a Terraform version to make this as easy and automated as possible.

For AWS it was just a case of creating an EC2 instance (other installation options are available) with a predefined WPT server AMI (amazon machine image), add in a few configuration options and boom – your very own, autoscaling, globally distributed, website performance testing solution! New test agents would spin up automatically in other AWS regions, all based on WebPageTest Agent AMIs.

In 2020 WebPageTest was bought by Catchpoint and we finally saw improvements being made, pull requests being closed, and the WebPageTest UI getting a huge update; things were looking great for WebPageTest enthusiasts! If you havent heard of Catchpoint before, they are a company who are all about global network and web application monitoring, so a good match for WebPageTest.

Unfortunately, however, this resulted in the handy WebPageTest server EC2 AMIs no longer existing. If you want your own private installation you now need to build your own WebPageTest server from a base OS. It can be a bit tricky, though it gives you greater understanding of how it works under the hood, so hopefully you’ll feel more confident extending your installation in future.

In this article, I’ll show you how to create a WebPageTest private instance on AWS from scratch (no AMI), create your own private WebPageTest agents using the latest and greatest version of WebPageTest, and wire it all up.

Continue reading →

I’ll be speaking at Velocity Conference New York 2014!


Velocity New York 2014

For the second year running I’ve been invited to speak at the fantastic web performance, optimisation, dev ops, web ops, and culture conference VelocityConf; in fact, it has become the essential training event and source of information for web professionals over the years it has been running.

Last year was the Europe leg of the conference, in London. This year I’ll be jetting off (via the cheapest possible flights known to google..) to New York City!

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the HTTP Archive

I’ll be speaking once again with Dean Hume (who has literally written the book on website performancee) about The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly of the HTTP Archive; we’ll be talking about technologies like the HTTP Archive and Google’s Big Query, but mainly about the secrets learned from some of the great sites and their dev teams, as well as some of the traps from some of the not so great sites. In most cases we’ll look at one small change which could help those no so great sites become a bit more great!

Where? When?

  • 09/17/2014 5:00pm
  • Room: Sutton South

Come and see us!

Venue

New York Hilton Midtown
1335 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10019
map

Office hours

Dean and I will also be hosting an Office Hours session where you’re invited to come and say hello, and talk to us about your Windows, .Net, Azure, EC2, web performance concerns or ideas; we’d love to have the opportunity to meet and speak with you, so please come and say hi!

Where? When?

  • 09/17/2014 2:45pm
  • Table 1 (Sponsor Pavilion)

DISCOUNTS!

There’s never been a better year to attend Velocity Conference; the line up is amazing, the contents are incredible, and the opportunity to talk with experts and passionate developers is priceless.

If you’re not sure how to convince your manager to send you – try the official Convince your Manager steps!

Once you’ve sorted that out, register and use the code given to you by your speaker friend (me!), for a whopping 20% discount: SPKRFRIEND.

You want more?


Velocity New York 2014

Velocity Conference EU 2013

The 3 day conference of web performance and operations & culture wrapped up recently, and having had the honour of presenting a session with my partner in crime Dean Hume called Getting The LEAST Out Of Your Images, and wandering around with the green underscored “Speaker” lanyard, here’s a brief summary of the event and some of my personal highlights.

Keynotes

First up, here are all of the keynote videos over on youtube; there were some really great keynotes including several from various sections of the BBC; some highlights for me were Addy Osmani’s UnCSS demo, Ilya Grigorik’s Big Query lightning demo, and the fantastic Code Club session from John Wards.

Presentations

There were a large number of sessions across three streams (web perf, mobile, and devops) covering all manner of topics from extreme anomaly detection in a vast torrent of data, through to optimising animation within a browser.

Some of the stand out sessions for me were:

Making sense of a quarter of a million metrics

Jon Cowie gave a brain melting 90 minute session taking us through how Etsy make sense of all of their monitoring data; given that they graph everything possible, this is no easy task.

Understanding the neurological impact of poor performance

Tammy Everts not only gives us an insight into the poor aeroplane connectivity where she lives, but also how people react emotionally to a poor performing website.

Rendering Performance Case Studies

Unfortunately this session clashed with the Etsy metrics one, but from what I heard it sounds like Addy Osmani had one of the best sessions at the whole conference.

High Performance Browser Networking

Another brain-melt session; Ilya gave an incredible insight into the complexities of fine tuning performance when taking into account what HTTP over TCP (and also over 3G) actually does.

Other Resources

All of slide decks are here, all of the keynotes are here, and there’s even a free online version of Ilya Grigorik’s High Performance Browser Networking book.

Summary

I probably enjoyed the 90 minute tutorial session on Wednesday more than the rest of the conference, but the Thurs and Fri were really jam packed with excellent sessions and impressive keynotes.

I loved speaking there and will certainly be pitching for more such conferences next year!

#velocityconf notes part 3: network performance amazingness

An absolutely brain melting session from Ilya Grigorik , talking about the intricacies of tcp, http (0.9-1.1-2.0), the speed of light, how the internet  instructure works, how mobile network browsing works, how http 1.1 doesn’t support the current use cases, and most fascinating for me: what mobile browsers actually do under the hood.

Amazing how an analytics beacon on a webpage or app could cause your entire battery to be zapped in a matter of hours.

It’s going to take me a few days to decompress this information in my fuzzy brain, so why not check the slides yourself here: http://bit.ly/hpbn-talk

So, I’m speaking at Velocity Conference EU!


Velocity EU Conference 2013

This week is an amazing one for web performance & operations and culture professionals; Monday & Tuesday is Devopsdays and Weds to Fri is Velocity Conference EU. If you’re concerned with web performance and the devops process, tooling, and culture (and if not, why the heck not?!) then get along (or get your company to get you a ticket) to one or even both events!

This coming Friday 13th November I have the pleasure of co-presenting a session called Getting The LEAST Out Of Your Images with my cohort, Dean Hume at this years Velocity Conference EU!

Velocity Conference is three days of presentations, events, and discussions along Web Performance and Operation & Culture. It’s been going for several years already and sees such big names in the web perf field as John Allspaw and Steve Souders, Ilya Grigorik, Yoav Weiss, and Paul Lewis, as well as well known faces from the Ops world.

I’ve already chosen most of the sessions I’ll be attending and I’m really looking forwards to it.

If you’re attending and aren’t sure where to head on Friday afternoon, I recommend popping into the Palace Suite at 4.15pm to see some slick slides and almost as slick presenters (*ahem*) in our session:

Getting The LEAST Out Of Your Images

rposbo_m
Come say hi if you spot me! Let me know what concerns you have with image optimisation on your (or your company’s) site (and buy me an espresso :P) and we’ll have a chat.


Velocity EU Conference 2013