Am happy to
be back again blogging some useful stuff after a long time !!
Recently when
i happened to have a discussion with one of the performance test engineer, I realized
to bring this point elaborately looking at his misunderstanding.
The Client-Side performance is of great importance as it assesses end-user experience. It
is vital to understand what is happening in the browser & its runtime (JavaScript
, DOM). Optimizing the front-end performance from a single user point of view
is very vital before testing an application with high user loads. The front-end,
client-side performance optimization is quite simple compared to back-end
performance optimization where lot of detailed analysis such as code profiling,
hardware upgrade, etc. is required.
I experienced it several times & learnt in a hard way that client-side
performance is always considered trivial as it is simple and can be quickly
performed with right set of tools.
There are
quite a good number of tools to do this analysis. To mention a few, Google's
WebPageTest tool, Yahoo's YSlow extension, FireFox's FireBug extension,
Google's pageSpeed, Ajax Dynatrace for IE, Speed Tracer extension for Google
Chrome, etc.
The Key Performance
Indicators (KPIs) like Response Time, Throughput, etc cannot be called as
client-side metrics. May be you get to see these metrics through the
performance test tool, but it is nothing to do with client-side metrics. The
KPIs usually represent the system performance after the end of a performance
test. These should be called as System Performance metrics or Performance KPIs.