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Real-time Performance Analytics with Pion and WebTuna

One of my goals is to create an easy to implement real-time web performance analytics solution that doesn’t rely on fragile, inaccurate javascript tags and I have been playing around with an idea on the weekend.

I used the performance measurement and analytics stream generation capabilities of Atomic Lab’s Pion to inspect the HTTP traffic directly off the network and measure the page load performance.

I then used some simple Python scripting within Pion to generate a beacon to www.webtuna.com, a UK-based performance analytics provider.

I then fired up webpagetest.org and generated some traffic from different nodes around the world and you can see the results graphically in the screen shot below.

image

The end result is a proof of concept that works brilliantly to tell you who is on your website, where they come from, what pages they have visited… and how fast the page appeared to load from the end-user’s perspective.

Keep in mind these are page load times, not server response times or data centre timings! At first glance they correlate with the webpagetest.org times with about 1/2 second, but I am going to do some more scientific testing when I get more time!

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Comments

Unknown said…
Great idea. We're doing something similar with Mobile. You'll be able to download a mobile browser that allows you to measure real time HTTP traffic metrics. In addition this will be coupled with device data, real time geo location data and the carrier/network. This will all be mashed out to a global map showing you whose on what network, where and how fast the web page is loading.

Cheers,

Peter
5o9 Inc.
2:53 pm
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