Patrick Meenan's Blog

I'm a news junkie (well, really an information junkie).

Like most of my recent projects, it started out with an itch I wanted to scratch so, instead of just answering the question I wanted answered, I WAY over-engineered a solution and used AI to build something instead.

Robin Marx has been asking me for a Compression Dictionary Transport (RFC 9842) test tool for a long time (since well before AI was actually useful for this kind of work).

I was getting really frustrated with Apple's search implementation for the "Messages" app (both on mobile and a MacBook) when trying to find specific messages from quite a while ago.

Maybe?

Ever since browser vendors started exposing advanced performance telemetry APIs directly to the page, like the Performance Timeline, Long Animation Frames (LoAF), and the JS Self-Profiling API, I've been waiting for tooling that could capture, store, and…

I've been wanting to build a 100% client-based waterfall tool for a long time.

Should we ship jQuery, React and other popular frameworks with browsers so sites don't have to re-download the same frameworks over and over?

I've used AI to generate a few websites over the last month or so and not too long before that I was helping my son create a website on Wix so I thought it might be interesting to see how they stack up against each other in terms of performance.

The actual writing of code hasn't been the bulk of development for a while, particularly in larger companies with larger codebases and existing users.

Wow, it has been a minute!

It has been 3 years since the last tour and a lot of people have been asking if it is still hosted in my basement so it's time for an update.

We've been working to bring better support for measuring web performance on mobile for a while.

TL;DR: WebPagetest will now expose any User Timing marks that a page records so you can use the same custom events for your synthetic test measurement as well as your Real User Measurement (and you can use WebPagetest to validate your RUM measurement poin…

TL;DR: Progressive JPEGs are one of the easiest improvements you can make to the user experience and the penetration is a shockingly-low 7%.

I have the pleasure of helping select the talks for a couple of the Velocity conferences this year and after looking at several hundred proposals it is clear that there are widely varying opinions from submitters on what would make for a good talk and also

My favorite web performance article in 2012 was this one from Kyle Rush about the work done on the Obama campaign's site during the 2012 election cycle.

I've spent the last week or so getting the IE testing in WebPagetest up to snuff for IE 10.

The FCC released their eighth broadband progress report yesterday.

Hot off of the Velocity Conference presses, iOS and Android 2.3 agents are now available from the Dulles, VA location on WebPagetest.

WebPagetest makes EC2 AMI's available for people to use for running private instances and makes fairly extensive use of them for running the testing for the Page Speed Service comparisons.

It has been an exciting 2 days.

Steve Souders had a great blog post last year that talked about Frontend Single Points Of Failure (SPOF).

Every now and then the topic of Anycast comes up in the context of web performance so I thought I’d take a stab at explaining what it is and the benefits. tl;dr – DNS servers should always be Anycast (and even some of the largest CDN’s are not so don’t ju…

We recently launched experimental support for testing with Firefox on WebPagetest and I've already had some interesting questions as people started to see things on WebPagetest that they were not used to seeing when they use the Firebug Net Panel (of which

It hasn't happened yet but it's a question of when, not if active monitoring of websites for availability and performance will be obsolete.

Well, I've been promising to do it for a while and it's finally ready.

I wanted to take a quick moment to dispel any fears that may be brewing about the future of WebPagetest with my move to Google (and in case this is the first time you're hearing it, surprise!

Stoyan's (always excellent) Performance Calendar went live today with an article I provided looking at the state of performance optimization in 2010 compared to 2008 (based on the tests run on WebPagetest).

One thing I've always been concerned about is people taking a single measurement point and using that as representative of the performance of their site.

One thing that has always amazed me while working on web performance is the need to push advertisers to care about the performance (speed) of their ads.

This is what open source is all about!

One of the things that has always bothered me about actively monitoring a site's performance (hitting it on a regular interval from an automated browser) is that you are only getting results for the specific page(s) you are monitoring from the locations a…

If you've been over to WebPagetest today you may have noticed that things have changed a bit (after you double-checked to make sure you were really at the correct site).

Hopefully by now it's clear that javascript in the head is bad - it blocks parallel requests from loading (for all but the newest browsers).

Europe is definitely a hotspot for interest in web performance (WebPagetest sees almost as much traffic from there as the US).

Last year I did some bulk analysis on the test data from WebPagetest to get a snapshot of what the distribution of results looked like.

This: In case you missed it, Google announced that site performance now affects your search rankings and in the article they included WebPagetest in the list of tools to use.

Sadly no, not that I'm aware of but it would make total sense and maybe if there is enough interest they would consider it.

A common complaint from users of WebPagetest is that I should make using a CDN (Content Distribution Network) an optional check (and it was a common complaint against YSlow as well before they did make it configurable in version 2).

For the most part, web site performance optimization has been something that an experienced developer had to be involved in and if they weren't then odds are your site doesn't perform well.

Update 2: All back to fully operational now, sorry for the inconvenience.

This is the first in what is likely to be a multi-post series discussing how HTTP works down at the TCP packet level, opportunities for improvement and a look at how some of the big players perform.

One of the things we like to look at is what a page looks like when it is loading, particularly if you are comparing a before and after or multiple sites to each other.

One of the really important features that WebPagetest offers is the ability to test on various different connection types.

I pulled together the results of the tests that have been run on WebPagetest over the past year and did a bunch of aggregate analysis.

As I look through the tests that come through WebPagetest I've been wondering if all of the optimization checks really make sense or if we should really be focusing on just the top 3 or 4 things that have the largest impact and not worrying about the smal…

Sort of as a follow-up to the last article, over the last couple of days there were some particularly interesting sites that are just failing horribly: Verizon's DNS error hijack - Verizon recently decided to start monetizing fat-fingered urls by taking o…

Pagetest has been online for 8 months now with close to 26,000 pages tested.

Sigh, webpagetest.org apparently got some visibility somewhere in the spam and script kiddie/vulnerability scanner communities.