UI performance monitoring tools

Question

I am looking for a tool that lets you monitor/log page rendering time on client machines. I am not looking for firebug/yslow because i want to know the following type of things:

• How does fast do my pages load when the user is in russia?
• How long does it take for javascript to run on some pages for everyone who accesses those pages?

So, i actually care what my site feels like to the people who use it. Do there exist tools that already do this?

I should add that my website is a software as a service website, not accessible publicly.

Answer 1

I've never heard of any way to do this. One solution, which may be terrible, might be to log the time yourself. At the top of your page have an inline script tag with a global variable called start that creates a new date. Then, have an onload listener that calls a function once the page is finished loading. In this function, get the difference between the start time and current time and send that back to your server. This is by no means that accurate, but might give you some idea. You could also log their IP address for geolocation when you send back the data.

Answer 2

There is not really a super easy way to do this effectively. but you can definitely fake the geo-location thing by using a proxy (which would actually give you N*2, time length) and get a pretty good idea at what it's like to browse your site.

As for JavaScript, you can profile it with the profiler in FireBug, this will give you an idea of what functions you should refactor and whatnot.

In my opinion I'd determine what most of your users are using or what the general demographic makeup they are, are they 75 year-old guys? If that is the case maybe they aren't up on the newer faster browsers, or for that matter don't care. If they are cool hipster designers in San Francisco, they its Safari 4.0... anyway this is just a way to determine the meat of the users, I think the best way is just grab an older laptop with Windows XP on it and just browse your site, you can use FireBug lite on browsers besides Firefox