LoadZen

28 January 2013

While here at Loadzen we’re constantly striving to help you write better apps, Loadzen isnlt the be-all and end-all of performance testing (no matter how much we wish it would be!).

Loadzen is designed to completely test your server side application and data layer, but one are where it does not test your site is in the asset download, footprint and efficiency – that’s where our top 3 load tester tools come in.

These tools will round off your load testing repertoire to ensure that you can fully optimise your site, leaving no potential bottleneck unidentified:

1. YSlow - YSlow is a tool developed by the good ol’ boys and girls at Yahoo! that will ‘diagnose’ your website code and visible setup to give you a score on where your site could improve in terms of public-facing web performance metrics. Some of the key indicators that it uses are: Using a CDN, using Sprites and minifying your CSS as well as a whole raft of other tests to ensure your site passes muster in your front end and asset delivery methods

2. Pingdom Tools - The pingdom tools are similar to YSlow in that they measure the front-end performance of your site, in particular timing each of the assets on your page to give you a great breakdown of what assets are taking longer to load. In addition to the front-end test, Pingdom can also test your website’s uptime, notifying you by SMS or email if your site seems to be down.

3. Google Page Speed - Another tool to measure the effectiveness of your site performance and benchmark it against others, Google’s offering is slightly more verbose and in-depth than YSlow and offers a great alternative to make sure you are getting accurate results and advice (and who better to give you performance advice than Google!?)

4. Loadzen! (Load testing made simple) - Naturally you can’t just test the front end of your site, so we’d recommend that once you’ve finished testing and optimising the front end of your website, you should take a long hard look at your server side application.

So there you have it, our top three alternatives for ensuring that your site is speedy, responsive and can withstand the traffic. What are your favourite tools?