Front End CI Performance Testing Overview

For an overview of webpagetest itself go to webpagetest.org. This page will outline my solution for front end CI performance testing, using webpagetest, jmeter and jenkins.

The big advantage of webpagetest over other solutions is it’s automation capability and the fact that this uses http, making it relatively easy to integrate into a CI solution based on jmeter and Jenkins.

I started out using webpagetest out of the box and plotting time to first byte, document complete and fully loaded time on particular pages. I had some limits set to determine pass/fail and this could drive the build:

But these days I’m more specific with my requirements, I test several key pages per build and I’m using webpagetest scripts to control what’s include in the timings. I consider both cached and uncached pages as I have requirements for both and I take an average of 3 timings for each. Note: the timings below look poor but this is on an internal test environment at an early stage of project development and the pages are not yet constructed with Prod configs:

Using Chrome or Firefox we get detailed timings for many steps of page load. Explorer gives more detail around page improvement, ala Google page speed but for automation I am finding the former two browsers more useful. I output the details I am interested in to the Jenkins project workspace, along with click through links for the full reports:

The screenshots above are all from Jenkins, the top level of the solution. Jenkins in turn calls jmeter:

And jmeter calls webpagetest:

And we actually analyse the results from the ‘Raw page data’ link that can be seen on the above screen shot. This results file is wide (90 columns of data) so here is a snippet:

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