Website monitoring service?

Question

Does anyone know a free or relatively low-cost website monitoring service? I've found many that will monitor server uptime, but nothing that seems to monitor average pageload times, and my boss is really on my case to get stats on how fast our sites are loading. I've googled just about every search term I can think of, but keep coming up empty handed.

Answer 1

It's unclear what you mean by "page load time."



>> If you mean, how long, from the time your server receives a POST, GET, HEAD, etc. request from a visitor, to the time your server has parsed its response stream and sent a response header back to the client, then you can monitor that several ways:



1. If you are using Apache, you can use ab to benchmark your server's performance:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html



There's also a metrics API you can download as an Apache package:

http://hadoop.apache.org/core/docs/r0.17.2/api/org/apache/hadoop/metrics/package-summary.html



2. If you are using PHP, you can easily determine the time of a script's execution using this method:

http://www.webdesign.org/web/web-programming/php/script-execution-time.8722.html



3. If you want to track how long it take to run an ASP.NET page, you can use the Trace class:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y13fw6we(VS.71).aspx



>> If you define "load time" as the period of time between when a Web browser sends a request header to your server and the page has completed loading on that client's computer, you can do that with jQuery, using a simple AJAX script like this:







If you are looking for a more integrated management solution, you can try one of these open-source solutions:



http://www.opensourcetesting.org/performance.php



Otherwise, you can search for "Web server benchmarking" (since that is what you describe) and find all sorts of suggestions and services.

Answer 2

Usually the web provider would have statistics about the up time of a site and what not. As for how fast the page loads, it all depends on some ones ISP and their PC. Basically how fast it is is what it comes down to. You can time how long it takes to load on your own computer, but thats about it. If there were to be any sort of tool like that, your web provider would probably have it, or at least have most of the information you are looking for.

Answer 3

Here's a webtool that does it:



http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/



Page load times are relative to the client. That metric isn't very accurate because it is measured by an outside service. Also, If the user has visited before the page file and graphics will be sometimes be cached on his machine. If the page is cached it loads more quickly then if it isn't. This metric is best measured on your server. You should be able to measure page load times for your actual visitors. You need to talk to your web host or your server administrator.

Answer 4

I don't know if they have exactly what you need but you might look into Google Analytics. It is free and easy to implement.

Answer 5

http://www.sitemeter.com/