What is a good tool or site to use to performance test a web page/site?

Question

What is a good tool or site to use to performance test a web page/site? I am trying to find a good baseline to detect how fast my page will load on one hosting provider vs another. I initially used http://www.freespeedtest.com/ but like to get opinions and links for others.

Answer 1

I use this to measure a page's size and number of HTTP requests required: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

I use Pingdom to measure my website's average response time.

Answer 2

I use Firefox with the FireBug and YSlow plugins installed.

Answer 3

Here are a few that I use:

http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/speedtester.html (This one is pretty detailed)

http://www.vertain.com/?sst (Very fast and simple speed test)

http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test (Another simple speed test)

Answer 4

YSlow addin for Firefox is very good for helping you tune performance as is the NET tab of firebug.

Answer 5

For simple basic testing, use ab (ApacheBench) or httperf.

Pingdom is very useful for initial analysis of a particular page and measurement of site response. However, this is not a load test tool.

For that you have to go to the commercial tools. Here are some options:

1. Keynote
2. Gomez strong text
3. Loadrunner

I also checked out Load Impact recently and it seemed like a good basic tool.

Lastly, here's a fairly comprehensive list of options. http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html#LOAD

Answer 6

Firebug with YSlow is a pretty common combination. Google also has PageTest which is another plugin which works with Firebug. It has a few different rules and such but is still pretty similar to YSlow. I like using both tools for initial testing since they can provide very simple and fast results.

Once you have started making optimizations and you want to see how performance is changing I would recommend using Pagetest. It provides a web interface for YSlow like performance results/analysis along with really nice waterfall charts to see where time is being spent. Perhaps the two most useful things about Pagetest are that 1) it allows you to easily perform multiple trials and 2) it gives clear results for cold and hot cache cases. I have found that multiple trials is the only real way to get realistic performance results, there is simply too much variance in single trials.