At the recent Velocity web performance conference, dynaTrace unveiled some of the new features coming in the 2.0 version of dynaTrace AJAX Edition - one of jQuery creator John Resig's favorite JavaScript testing tools.  While dynaTrace AJAX 1.0 has gotten rave reviews and collates a wealth of data for website performance testing (full JavaScript traces, full DOM traces, tracing XmlHttpRequests (XHR), Network Traffic, and deep insight into the browser’s rendering engine), dynaTrace AJAX 2.0 promises to offer even more power.  

dynaTrace AJAX is best known for filling a major gap in web development: deep performance testing tools for Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8.  Although there will eventually be support for Firefox, the main focus for dynaTrace developers is to expand the amount of data collected, automate more of its analysis, and make large amounts of data more readily understandable.

Automatic, Easily Digestible Analysis

The screenshot shows you the new Performance Report coming in 2.0, which will replace the old summary view:



The report contains summarized grades for 5 key performance indicators.  Here are the 5 major areas of performance discussed on the dynaTrace blog:

• Key Performance Indicators on End-User Web Site Performance: this includes Time to First Impression, Time to onLoad, Time to Fully Loaded and the number of HTTP Roundtrips it takes to fully load the page
• Usage of Browser Caching: this includes analysis of resources without any cache settings, cache settings in the past or cache settings with a very short expiration date (<48 hours)
• Usage of Network Resources and Bandwidth: this includes looking at HTTP Roundtrips that can be avoided, such as HTTP Redirects, 400s and 500s. It also includes analysis of which resources can be merged, such as JavaScript, CSS or images.
• Server-Side Processing: here we look at all dynamic requests that make it to the application server and pick those that have a high server-side time. We give advice on our dynaTrace Best Practices on Server-Side Performance Problems such as we did recently in the Top 10 List of Performance Problems taken from engagements we had with Zappos, Monster, Thomson and co
• JavaScript/AJAX Performance: here we analyze large JavaScript execution blocks and give recommendations on optimizing access to the DOM via jQuery/Prototype like frameworks.

The Key Performance Indicators (KPI) tab on the Performance report shows crucial metrics that focus on how the end user will experience your site, regardless of the connection or hardware you are testing on.  Some of the KPI's include First Impression, Fully Loaded, On Server and On Client, Avg. Interactive, Avg. Wait, and Single Resource Domains.  You can find out what these mean on dynaTrace's Best Practices page.


The final feature mentioned at the Velocity conference was showslow.com integration, which allows you to upload a performance analysis to a repository where your site's performance can be compared to other major web properties.

Get your own free download of the dynaTrace AJAX Edition Beta 1.