Performance testing of web applications at browser side (JavaScript, rendering)

Web application performance testing often includes just server-side load tests. In other words, one just uses Apache JMeter, Yandex.Tank, and similar tools to load the server side. Unfortunately, those kinds of tests miss browser part of the application. One of the obvious approaches there might be to apply Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrika, etc. That, however, comes with issues included. For instance, one does not simply send data out of an enterprise environment. On top of that, a mere inclusion of analytics script is not enough to gain sufficient information on the application performance.

The talk examines the way to measure browser-related response times (JavaScript, rendering, AJAX). We’ll learn why response times from Selenium are not suitable for performance validation. We’ll check if boomerang.js solves the problem and we’ll highlight important aspects of browser-related performance monitoring. We’ll learn how to measure response times in presence of AJAX requests coming in parallel. Browser, CSS, JavaScript, and server-side tuning is out of the scope of the talk.