High Performance Web Sites blog

This week I co-chaired Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly. It was great! Jesse and I told the story about how the conference came about. When we proposed the conference we believed there was a community of performance and operations engineers that needed a forum to share and learn, and the attendance at Velocity confirmed this. Velocity sold out with over 600 attendees!

The lineup of speakers was great. There was a lot of material packed in a 2-day conference. I stayed in the Performance track, but wanted to attend every session in the Operations track, too. Many speakers shared their slides, and there are videos and photos from some of the talks.

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A few product launches are being announced at Velocity. I was able to get an early look at KITE 2.0 from Keynote. I’ve worked with Keynote for years. They have a strong platform of services for measuring web site availability and performance. KITE, Keynote’s Internet Testing Environment, is the customer tool for creating test scripts. KITE 2.0 has many new features that caught my eye:

• Test scripts can include taking actions based on DOM events, such as the creation of a DOM element or even the contents of a DOM element matching a specified pattern.
• An intuitive HTTP profile is displayed in the client app.
• Tests can be executed at five cites worldwide on the Keynote backbone.
• It’s free! You don’t need to be a Keynote customer to use it.

KITE 2.0 is available through an early adopters program. There are some features I’d like to see added: the ability to execute a test script multiple times, exporting test results measured from my client, and getting time measurements that correspond to certain events in the page. I recommend trying this early version if you’re looking for a tool to record and execute web page test scripts.