The talk I’m most excited about for today is next! I made sure to get here early…
@wesleyhales from apigee and @ryanbridges from CNN
Quick overview on load testing tools- firebug, charles, har viewers and whatnot; but its super manual.
Better- selenium, but it’s old yo and not hip anymore.
There are services out there: harstorage.com, harviewer etc that you can use too.
Webpagetest.org is pimped again, but apparently caused an internal argument in CNN.
Performance basics
– caching
– gzip: don’t gzip that’s already compressed (like jpegs)
– know when to pull from cdn’s
Ah! New term bingo! “Front end ops”- aka sucks to code something and then realize there need to be a ton of things to do to make things perform even more. Continued definition:
– keep an eye on perf
– manager of builds and dependencies (grunt etc)
– expert on delivering content from server to browser
– critical of new http requests/file sizes and load times
I’m realizing that building front ends is a lot more like building server side code….
Wes recommends having a front end performance ops position and better analytics.
A chart of CNN’s web page load times is shown.
So basically, every time CNN.com is built by bamboo, the page load time is analyzed, saved and analyzed. They use phantomjs for this which became Loadreport.js.
Loadreport.wesleyhales.com is the URL for it.
Filmstrip is a cool idea that stores filmstrips of all pages loaded.
Speed reports is another visualization that was written.
Hard parts
– performance issues needs more thought; figure out your baseline early
– advertisers use document.write
– server location
– browser types: DIY options are harder
– CPU activity: use a consistent environment
All in all, this has many of the same concerns when you’re doing server side performance
CI setup
– bamboo
– Jenkins
– barebones Linux without x11
– vagrant
Demo was shown that used Travis ci as the ci system.
All in all, everyone uses phantomjs for testing; check it out; look at fluxui on github for more!
the agile admin 