Google recently posted an article on their testing blog: Survival techniques for acceptance tests of web applications (Part 1). In it they note the difference between various expressions used with Selenium to get access to an object on a web page:
Steve Souders, a senior web performance expert at Google, recently wrote a fantastic analysis about why high performing websites should avoid CSS rules that include the @import statement:
In Chapter 5 of High Performance Web Sites, I briefly mention that @import has a negative impact on web page performance. I dug into this deeper for my talk at Web 2.0 Expo, creating several test pages and HTTP waterfall charts, all shown below. The bottomline is: use LINK instead of @import if you want stylesheets to download in parallel resulting in a faster page.
When doing any type of performance testing, whether it be production monitoring, load testing, stress testing, or simple performance tuning, one of the most important data metrics is the Time to First Byte (TTFB). As the name implies, TTFB is the amount of time it took for the client (usually a web browser) to receive the first byte in a given request. While the total time it took to download the object (ie: Time to Last Byte – TTLB) is also important, the TTFB usually tells a more important story, especially when it comes to software layer optimizations.
A couple weeks ago I was interviewed on the Startup Success Podcast about BrowserMob, testing in the cloud, and cloud computing in general. If you’re interested in any of these topics, please check out the podcast here.
While you’re at it, the same Startup Success Podcast also recently interviewed UserTesting.com about their crowd-sourced usability testing service. Also worth a listen, here.
In the last few weeks we’ve worked with several customers who all experienced similar issues with their site under load: users were reporting that data they entered in to form fields was “disappearing” and that they were being asked to re-enter it a second time.
While no two websites are exactly the same, we were surprised to see that in each of these cases the same root issue was to blame. Specifically, these sites all used advanced AJAX techniques to make parts of a form dynamically change based on the values selected by the user earlier in the form.
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