Basic Web Performance Part 2

In last article we saw the importance of better performing Web site . So we need to make sure that our sites are performing better but before we work on improving the performance we need tool to measuring  the Web site performance. In this article and series of next articles we will talk about few tools which will help measure the performance . Here is list of tools we we look at.

1. Fiddler
2. Microsoft Network Analyzer
3. IIS Log files
4. 3rd Party Services

While we will have a look on top three we will not talk about the fourth one which is basically services that benchmark your web site against the different web sites. So lets start with Fiddler.
We touched upon some of core feature of Fiddler ; lets get started with practical. I will hit upon Microsoft.com and Fiddler will then capture and we will start analyze the data through various functionality provided by fiddler. Below is the screen shot of the request which gets generated upon hitting microsoft.com.

Timeline provides the graphical representation of the request response times .The data captured through the Fiddler can be saved for later reference. In image above the right panel shows the timeline , as you can see the aspx page got loaded in 2 seconds but the other  content on the site took 14+ seconds; which shows most of time is spend on downloading static resources.

There is another feature which is called Statistics which apart from other details lets us know the response bytes (by Content type) against the content which can determine the most consuming bandwidth data that can be looked upon for optimization.

 In above figure you can see the maximum bandwidth is used by the jpeg files and those are good sources of optimization.