

[Ask HN]: Really testing out my website.. - jason_slack

MacBook OS X 10.6, 8gb RAM, 750gb SATA, took out my SuperDrive and put in a second 750GB.<p>I have an HTML5 video streaming site I have been working on, about 300gb and I develop it fully on my MacBook.<p>I want to get a sense how well the site runs in terms of resources for each connection or get an idea of the coding changes I make if they are increasing resources needed or decreasing...Get an idea of when someone just lands on the site, how much did that cost in terms of resources? if I make JavaScript changes are they saving or costing?<p>Get what I am saying? I am having a hard time phrasing it in the manner I want.<p>Tools that I can use to decide if the changes I am making are good or bad, ways for me to see what parts of my site are using the most resources...<p>A long time ago I remember Rational had a testing suite, but I am poor and would like OSS or low cost..<p>Thinking more out loud with an example. Say I measure my current site and then I rewrite using the HTML5 boilerplate template and see how that stacks up before I deploy everything to production..or maybe after than I optimizing my JS better, what does the site now cost per session...
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jph
You could try searching for software like this:

Load testing software -- can do things like download many video streams at
once, to show you how well your server handles it. An open source example is
Apache JMeter at <http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/>

Split testing software -- can compare and contrast different approaches to a
web site, typically by creating two versions of a resource like web page A and
web page B, then tracking which is most successful by whatever metric you
want. Look at Bingo Card Creator by HackerNews user "paraschopra" at
<http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo/resources>

System monitoring software -- can do things like graph your RAM and CPU over
time, as well as let you script more sophisticated tracking like average CPU
spike per connection. An open source example is Nagios at <http://nagios.org/>

Browser simulation testing -- can do automate click testing on your site, for
example to create a test that pretends to be a user clicking on your links
which run your javascript changes. An open source example is Selenium at
<http://seleniumhq.org/>

