At the first ever O'Reilly Velocity conference in San Francisco yesterday we witnessed the debut of three new tools to measure website performance - KITE, Jiffy and CloudStatus. Not only are these tools very cool and useful, they are also free!
All about making websites faster and better, the conference was packed with more than 600 performance jocks - premiere among them Google's Steve Souders, who as Yahoo's performance guru developed a bag of tricks to make Yahoo speedy. Souders created YSlow, a Firefox add-on that analyzes web page performance, and wrote the book "High Performance Web Sites". Along the way he convinced O'Reilly to create the Velocity conference which he co-chairs.
We can report that the conference fills a big need for performance planning, measurement, analysis, reporting. But the best news from the conference is that three vendors announced their latest measurement tools. To top that, they are all free! Here is a brief run down of the tools, which we will describe in more detail in later blogs after we give them a spin.
KITE
Keynote Systems, the oldest player in the web measurement space, launched a nifty service called KITE. This sophisticated tool lets you record a series of user steps in a browser and then lets you see the actual performance related to the steps. You can then load the steps as a script to five Keynote test servers anywhere in the world to run automated tests. All you need is a standard browser. If you sign up soon you get a free myKeynote account to see the results.
Jiffy
The folks at the people search site WhitePages.com, discovered that data from synthetic agents didn't provide them with what they needed for rich media applications that leverage Java and Ajax. So they developed their own tool set called Jiffy now available as open source. You simply incorporate Jiffy code into the web pages you want to track. The code is a lightweight Java script that marks the start and stop of a user task as seen at the remote browser. You can then measure page rendering times, report those measurements to a web server, aggregate the logs into a database, and generate reports. WhitePages.com has made this open source tool set available under the Apache 2.0 license.
CloudStatus
If you want to leverage cloud computing to support your business you need to ask, "Who is watching the cloud?" Hyperic has an answer with a free service call CloudStatus that tracks the performance of major cloud computing services. Still in beta, CloudStatus covers the five basic services offered by Amazon, with more monitoring capabilities in the works. This deep view into the infrastructure will become essential as we move advanced web businesses into the cloud.
We suggest you check out these tools. They are examples of the 'Net at its finest. Each new technology arrives on the scene with a unique set of measurement challenges. Once the community understands these challenges, it meets them with tools that become widely available, often for free. The current business model (which seems to be working) is to charge for more service, details, or features. The beauty of this approach is the community gets a lot of value for free before buying.
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