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Rate my startup - Slowcop - measure your website's speed

206 points| marketer | 15 years ago |slowcop.com | reply

90 comments

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[+] snowmaker|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] huhtenberg|15 years ago|reply
Companies like Keynote and Webmetrics have been doing it for years and it does in fact cost big bucks with them.
[+] tedjdziuba|15 years ago|reply
www.webpagetest.org is what you are looking for.
[+] kqueue|15 years ago|reply
How is that better than webkit's inspector?

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

[+] marketer|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] purp|15 years ago|reply
Because every useful tool has the opportunity to establish an audience, make a market, monetize, and become successful. Sounds like a startup to me.
[+] lazyjeff|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
My goal is to focus on performance, I haven't thought about branching out to other areas yet :) Seems interesting though..
[+] kamens|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
Cool, that's actually what I'm building next. A simple deploy hook mechanism. Want to shoot me a quick e-mail? [email protected]
[+] dtran|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] timinman|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
+1, it would be nice to see server response time, dns lookup and other numbers in milliseconds.

Otherwise looks like a great tool.

[+] jbarham|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
Very nice indeed! Increased page score on grsites.com from 92 to 96 in 5 minutes. More convenient than YSlow. Bookmarked!
[+] marketer|15 years ago|reply
Awesome, glad you found it useful!
[+] idoh|15 years ago|reply
How is this better than Y!Slow?
[+] marketer|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] BenVoss|15 years ago|reply
No need to download/install?
[+] netnichols|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
+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.
[+] marketer|15 years ago|reply
Webpagetest is useful - it's the best place to get an IE speed report. The reports can take a while to generate, though.
[+] measure2xcut1x|15 years ago|reply
I also like how webpagetest.org includes links to downloadable tcpdump files.
[+] miles|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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.