- Introduction
- YSlow
- Pingdom Tools
- IBM Page Detailer
- Fiddler
- Quick Fixes
- Summary
IBM Page Detailer
The IBM Page Detailer is a simple plug-in for the Windows' socket stack (Winsock). It tracks and timestamps requests made from the actual web browser on your workstation and displays them in a graph. As the Page Detailer captures the requests made by your browser, it documents the limitations of your browser platform. For example, the graph produced when I was visiting my blog's home page with an empty browser cache (see Figure 7) clearly illustrates that the browser uses only two concurrent HTTP sessions to the same host, and that the JavaScript files (the two very small items in the third and fourth row) actually block further download activity.
The Page Detailer can also illustrate the impact of browser caching: The number of components loaded the second time I visited the same web page during the same browser session is significantly reduced, as shown in Figure 8.
However, due to suboptimal caching of web page components (the JavaScript files from Feedburner have no Expires header), the browser loads significantly more files when I revisit the same web page after closing and restarting the browser (see Figure 9).