
Rate my startup - Slowcop - measure your website's speed - marketer
http://www.slowcop.com
======
snowmaker
Very cool. We've been looking for a tool like this for Scribd for a couple of
years now.

If you built this out so it handled multiple locations, browsers, pages, etc.
we would pay big bucks for it.

~~~
tedjdziuba
www.webpagetest.org is what you are looking for.

~~~
thamer
<http://www.yottaa.com/> also tracks multiple location, and keeps tracking
over time.

------
kqueue
How is that better than webkit's inspector?

And why every tool on HN now is called a startup?

~~~
marketer
Keep in mind this is the first version, it's the result of a couple months
work. There's a lot of features I want to add.

Webkit inspector is a great tool, but it doesn't track performance over time,
which is the goal of Slowcop.

------
lazyjeff
Very nice, the suggestions seem more useful than some of the other tools I've
seen. Is it possible to combine this with an SEO checker, spellcheck, and
browser incompatibility check?

PS: running slowcop on slowcop.com yields a few areas of improvement ;-)

~~~
marketer
My goal is to focus on performance, I haven't thought about branching out to
other areas yet :) Seems interesting though..

------
kamens
Really helpful. Using this to improve www.khanacademy.org results right now. I
find this slightly easier to parse than pagespeed/yslow and look forward to
the "performance changes over time" reports.

------
epoxyhockey
I like it! It's nice and fast and comparable services make me wait in a queue
before receiving a report.

One issue is that I'm going to forget about your service by tomorrow. I only
optimize my website when I make significant changes to the design or template,
which is just a handful of times per year.

It would be nice if there was some kind of hook that would remind me about
your useful service in the future. Maybe if you were able to detect when I
change my website layout or add a javascript widget, you could send an email
notification like "we've detected some changes in your website, visit us again
to optimize page load times."

~~~
marketer
Cool, that's actually what I'm building next. A simple deploy hook mechanism.
Want to shoot me a quick e-mail? hoisie@gmail.com

------
dtran
Awesome! Automated YSlow is definitely something I would like to have. If I
pushed something and it's making my pages load slower and that's costing me
users, I need to know.

I know some Mozilla folks were working on an automated YSlow tool called
Cesium, but progress seems to have stopped there, so I'm glad someone picked
up the torch. <http://blog.mozilla.com/webdev/2009/07/09/cesium-01/>

Interesting to note that a lot of the suggestions I received were about
minifying external JS files. It is kind of ridiculous how much external JS
every page has now.

------
boyter
Pretty useful. I did some quick mods and went from a 89 to 98 pretty quickly
which isnt too bad.

Only complaint is that I had to click to expand out the page speed problems.
You might want to add a horizontal triangle or some other visual indicator
there is more to look at. Either that or expand them all by default but allow
people to close them.

Only issue was that it suggested I could minify my JS and gain a 0% reduction
in a few cases.

~~~
marketer
Wow, 98 is a great score (higher than Google!)

You're right, there's a lot of noise in the results. If the size reduction is
small, like a few bytes, there's no need to show that.

~~~
boyter
There is always a fair amount of noise which I just tend to ignore. YSlow
always penalises me for not using a CDN for example.

Something useful to add would be links for the compressed images you use to
work out how compressing the images could save space. A side by side
comparison would be pretty useful so I could see how the compressing changes
the look of the page.

Just for fun I ran it over <http://duckduckgo.com> which comes back with 100.
Google comes back with 98. Interesting.

------
timinman
Thanks for creating this. It helps a novice 'see the forrest for the trees' to
make significant improvements easier. I love some of these suggestions, too.

How about this one?: Make it game-ish. "Your rank of 88/100 means your site
loads faster than 75% of the sites we've tested," or "Congratulations! You've
unlocked the Road Runner Badge!" Make the following improvements to unlock
Speedy Gonzales."

------
dialtone
Very nice.

Better than tools.pingdom.com in that it loads all the javascript and code
form the site.

Next features that would make it very useful to me are (in order):

\- Display timings on the timeline (in Chromium I can't see them, maybe
display them on click or hover)

\- Recurring checks (of course this is your core. You are already working on
this I imagine)

\- Different locations in the world (including being able to slice up my
reporting based on the location)

\- Custom alerts on specific urls (url X cannot take more than Y seconds to
load inside my page, beyond more classic ones like total page load time and
such)

\- Hot cache-Cold cache

\- In case of alert also generate a tcptraceroute and compare it to one that
is collected every X minutes.

\- Ability to set the host header separately (so I can use the IP address in
the site url and the host for a specific virtualhost, this is useful when a
site is geographically distributed and you just want to cut out the DNS
lookup).

Also have a look at many of your potential competitors like Gomez.

~~~
marketer
Awesome, thanks for the suggestions :)

Gomez is probably the largest competitor. They do a lot of enterprise sales,
which isn't something I'm planning any time soon.

------
pardo
Nice site and design. It seems it doesn't really add much to YSlow but it's
nice anyway.

It does have the same problem that all the other speed checkers that I've
tried. When you have a decently optimized page, most of the errors or problems
it founds have to do with external services over which you do not have much
control.

For example, facebook widgets and google apis (analytics, charts, ...).

It is always a little frustrating when you are told to change something that
you can not really influence:

There are 5 JavaScript files served from static.ak.fbcdn.net. They should be
combined into as few files as possible.

    
    
        * http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/y1/r/...js
        * http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/yB/r/...js
        * http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/yQ/r/...js
        * http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/yg/r/...js
        * http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/yg/r/...js

------
jhrobert
Very nice indeed.

In the Resource Timeline, when hovering, it would be nice to have the exact
millisecs in addition to the existing proportional colored rectangles. The
absolute total time could be added on the black hovering div on the left.

Thanks to the tool I discovered that the DNS time of my domains was far from
perfect, thanks! (my host in on amazon EC2 west, but my DNS is french
Gandi.net...)

Also nice would be the performance on reload (ie with a hot cache instead of a
cold one).

~~~
valcker
+1, it would be nice to see server response time, dns lookup and other numbers
in milliseconds.

Otherwise looks like a great tool.

------
jbarham
Given that you're the guy behind web.go, is Slowcop is written using Go and
web.go? If so, how are you finding writing production web code in Go? Can you
share any info/tips on the hosting setup behind Slowcopy?

(FWIW I'm an avid Go programmer and filed an issue on httplib.go when it was
broken by release.2011-02-15. Thanks for the quick fix!)

------
grsites
Very nice indeed! Increased page score on grsites.com from 92 to 96 in 5
minutes. More convenient than YSlow. Bookmarked!

~~~
marketer
Awesome, glad you found it useful!

~~~
grsites
One little tip: many people use Google Analytics and there's no use listing
"<http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js> under "Leverage browser caching"
since we can't do anything about it and caching it would defeat the purpose
anyway.

~~~
Charuru
actually you can cache it. Or at least I think so...

------
idoh
How is this better than Y!Slow?

~~~
marketer
YSlow is a great tool - I've used it a lot.

The main problem with using YSlow is it doesn't show performance trends over
time. One of my goals for Slowcop is to give a dashboard where you can track
performance across deploys.

Also, there are a bunch of other tools and features I'm planning to add, like
measurements from different regions and tools that track lower-level HTTP
issues.

~~~
idoh
Makes sense, thanks!

~~~
jonah
Tool looks really nice. I expect you'll be adding resources to the Academy and
then linking to them from the results page? Losslessly compress my images?
Recommend some tools. etc.

------
netnichols
Nice start, and some good comments/suggestions here for you to follow up on.

My own suggestion: make sure to reference relevant tutorials in the 'Academy'
section from within the reports. I made a couple of reports before really
finding the 'Academy', which could be a very valuable resource.

------
gokhan
Nice.

\- On the report page, call to action should be highlighted more.

\- Call to action may be positioned at the bottom of the page. Since I
immediately want to scroll down to see my site's result, I will most probably
skip the one at the top.

\- Graph does not show time (at least for me). Just colored bars and the
legend.

\- I don't know if you're heading to the page execution side of the problem,
but if you'll do it, when you show specific vertical bars, add a hint to
explain the significance of that bar ( _This is where JQuery's document ready
fired_ , etc.) on the graph. Hover popups would be much better for
inexperienced folks.

\- Allow me to exclude some warnings from the report, future reports. Google
Analytic script gets a caching warning but it's given and not something I can
improve.

\- Results can be collapsed by default.

------
stoked
I've been using <http://www.webpagetest.org> which is pretty well known in WPO
circles. It's not as "pretty" as your site, but offers more features like
recording video, Dynatrace recordings, firstview vs 2ndview, etc.

~~~
Concours
+1 for <http://www.webpagetest.org> , it's probably one of the best if not THE
best performance testing webapp on the web. I've been using it for a while and
it's just amazing. I love your Academy section, as well as the simplicity of
the site landingpage.

------
miles
Would it be possible to show sites that scored in the same range? The site I
tested garnered a score of 100/100. How is that score calculated? There must
be sites served faster/better than mine - who are they? Also, how about a "Top
10" list of fastest, slowest, etc?

------
nuxi
It doesn't parse URLs correctly, e.g. this works: www.google.com

but this doesn't: www.google.com:80

See <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt>, section 3.2.2 for the spec.

Otherwise, looks very useful.

------
jefe78
I like what you've done. As an aside, I noticed you're using Slicehost. You
can get better performance, for cheaper from Linode if you want. I've switched
many a client to Linode and never heard a complaint.

Just a suggestion.

~~~
skeletonjelly
Nice try, Linode.

------
URSpider94
Very clean. Some quick suggestions:

Make it clear that a higher score is better for page download speed. I think
this is true, but there's no real indication of this on the page

Some kind of explanatory histogram showing relative performance vs. other web
sites would be useful. It might even be useful to group load time by page type
and size (landing page vs. web app internal page, for example)

For the tune-up items at the bottom of the page, you've reversed the scale --
high numbers are now less significant than low ones. Also, it seems that a
100-point scale here might be overkill.

------
whackedspinach
the suggestions are really nice, but can you eventually link to tutorials for
those of us who need a bit of help?

For example, under "Minify CSS", you could say: "Need help? Here's a CSS
compression tool."

~~~
jonp
I'd find this very helpful too.

------
mike-cardwell
"Error generating report for <https://grepular.com/> \- Could not resolve
address"

Is this due to HTTPS? This site really should support HTTPS...

EDIT: If I enter "<http://grepular.com/> instead, it works. That URL simply
redirects to the HTTPS version...

EDIT2: The only listed "problem" for my site is:

    
    
      Remove the following redirect chain if possible:
          * http://grepular.com/
          * https://grepular.com/
    

Don't think I'll be doing that thanks ;)

~~~
nopal
The suggestion may exist because it's possible to do nasty things if a user
(particularly a logged-in user) goes to your http address.

If you don't have cookies configured to use https only (you don't), an
attacker can grab a user's cookies. They can also intercept your redirect and
send users to another site (see sslstrip).

~~~
mike-cardwell
I don't understand what you're talking about. My entire site is HTTPS, I also
use Strict-Transport-Security, have a ruleset in HTTPS-Everywhere, and I don't
use cookies at all. If I were to use cookies, I'd make sure to add the secure
and httpOnly flags.

Me putting a redirect on http to https is no less secure than not providing
http at all.

------
acdha
Nice - how closely have you looked at yotaa.com? They seem to be doing a very
similar play but are further along with UI and with testing from multiple
locations.

~~~
marketer
Yeah I've seen them. There are a few tools that do similar things. My long
term goal is to be a full stack tool (both client and server side). I'm not
sure where Yotta is going.

------
Inviz
Very good tool and gives fairly optimistic results (slowcop.com gets 95/100)
and quite some interesting tips. Going to use this next time instead of YSlow.

The only thing is that it really is into minifying the css and gives high
numbers of potential savings. It'd be more helpful to display a number that
takes gzip compression into account. Something like "Minify this css to save
31% (5% after compression)"

------
Mumba
One more site that does google's "Page Speed" test and presents the result as
its own? Do you think your firefox+firebug+pagespeed backend will be able to
handle heavy load? Looks like <http://www.webpagetest.org> and
<http://siteloadtest.com> are the only honest tests out there

------
huhtenberg
The site is really quick, which is very impressive.

Question though - the page loading times are measured by... WebKit? Gekko?
Home-brewed page loader?

------
frederickcook
It says our web host is Amazon, but we're definitely on the Rackspace cloud.
Does Rackspace have a dirty little secret?

~~~
marketer
I looked it up, and it says heyo.com is hosted on EC2..
[http://whois.arin.net/rest/nets;q=174.129.212.2?showDetails=...](http://whois.arin.net/rest/nets;q=174.129.212.2?showDetails=true&showARIN=false)

Maybe Rackspace is hiding something :)

~~~
frederickcook
No, I'm sorry, this is my brain-fart. We recently switched our static pages to
a Heroku instance in anticipation of a web app launch in a few days, but keep
our server stuff on the Rackspace cloud. Proceed with down-voting.

------
steveklabnik
I tried it: sat on the 'building report' screen for a while, and then when I
hit refresh, said "report not found."

~~~
marketer
The site's getting a lot of traffic right now, but reports should work. I'd
try again..

~~~
steveklabnik
Ah, it worked this time. Nice!

I especially like the 'try it and then sign up afterwards' aspect.

------
aquark
Great implementation!

Obvious UI, works fast presents the information in a very clean and clear
format.

The blog & academy pages could do with some of the polish of the main site,
but that is understandable! I also wasn't totally clear on what the NN/100
numbers represented on the report page?

------
aik
This is great. Few issues:

1\. The "generating" process didn't do anything until I hit refresh, then
everything appeared.

2\. The "Forward a copy of this report via email" link doesn't do anything?
(I'm in Chrome 8)

3\. Reading the improvements under each header could be formatted in a much
more easy to read format.

Thanks!

~~~
marketer
Thanks, the server is heavily loaded right now, so some of the ajax effects
aren't showing.

The forward link should work. The report page has a lot of content, and
forwarding is done with a lightbox. Try again?

------
joshfraser
Neat. Another great tool for measuring performance is webpagetest.org. It
gives you the ability to choose a browser and a location to test from -- both
of which are really important factors to consider when timing a site. It's
open-source too!

------
yoshgoodman
Hacker News only scored 88/100 where google scored 98/100
<http://www.slowcop.com/reports/4d64d9ef34b95f5bbe000126>

------
ElbertF
It looks like you're not following your own advice. :)

<http://www.slowcop.com/reports/4d6468ff34b95f3cbb000554>

~~~
marketer
Most of that crap is from the Facebook and Twitter buttons :/

------
wyck
I don't understand all the website speed tests sites, this second new one I
have seen this week. And calling it a startup????

What about the firebug net tab, or yslow or chrome resources?

------
BenVoss
I like it, nice job. Fast, clean and simple UI.

------
benzheren
How long does it take to generate the report? I just submitted one url and
after several minutes it was still loading.

~~~
marketer
Try again - and sometimes it helps to refresh the page after generating the
report. If you think there's a bug shoot me an e-mail hoisie@gmail.com .

~~~
benzheren
Just tried again this morning, it works great. Last night it was really really
slow.

------
dadro
Very cool. Would you mind (very briefly) describing some of the
infrastructure/tools/backend used to build Slowcop?

------
bkhl
Awesome. However, you said this is a "startup". How are you going to monetize
this besides the obvious (ads)?

~~~
marketer
The long-term goal is to have a subscription service that tracks performance
issues. There are other possibilities, like ads, referral programs,
consulting, etc..

------
insight
Nice. Name is great. Simple and useful

------
ultrasaurus
Love it, but I find myself re-running it 3 times to get an average. Any chance
that can be automated?

------
sv123
I like, could be good competition for keynote. Is there a way to show client
time in the chart?

------
maguay
Nice, looks like the Facebook widget takes the longest to load on my site :)

------
nands
Good stuff. The analysis is better than YSlow.

------
pkchen
nice and clean -- i like it. how is it different from tools.pingdom.com
though?

~~~
ffumarola
This is the exact question I was going to ask.

I've always used Pingdom and YSlow. I would consider spelling out the
differences so users know what your USP is.

------
d_c
Looks like loadimpact.com :)

------
workhorse
Nobody has mentioned Firebug in 59 comments?

Am I on Hacker News? I had to check the site header real quick.

------
vegai
https?

------
bigwally
Nice. Very useful.

Suggestion, try changing your URLs. instead of

<http://www.slowcop.com/reports/4d6468ff34b95f3cbb000554>

try <http://www.slowcop.com/reports/www.slowcop.com>

by doing this you will get a lot of link traffic.

~~~
vaporstun
One problem with following your suggestion is that you cannot refer to an
older test again. By including the test id in the URL, I was able to email
myself the link, make some changes to my site, then run it again and compare
the new results side-by-side against the old results. If only referenced by
the site URL, no such comparison would be possible.

Might I therefore suggest a hybrid.

Using <http://www.slowcop.com/reports/www.slowcop.com>

will run the test on www.slowcop.com at the time the link is clicked, but have
a way to retrieve a permalink URL to that particular test which is like:

[http://www.slowcop.com/reports/www.slowcop.com/4d6468ff34b95...](http://www.slowcop.com/reports/www.slowcop.com/4d6468ff34b95f3cbb000554)

so you can reference old tests for comparison.

