Measuring performance of clients

Question

I'm currently researching any ways to gather some analytics/metrics on the performance of client machines to our webapp. The app is heavily ajax and we are hoping to gather some stats about how well the clients machines are running it.

We don't necessarily want to put performance monitoring code all through the application (for a great number of reasons this may not be feasible anyways). Rather we would like to be able to run some kind of test or something when a user submits feedback that could give us an idea of how well their browser/computer performs.

This has been a slightly tricky thing to research as it keeps bringing up discussions about profiling etc. This is obviously useful but only to a point as our development machines are massively overpowered. We are hoping to get some metrics on the kinds of machines our clients are connecting with.

Does any kind of library/framework or best practice exist for this? So far my best though is to run some kind of CPU intensive process through JS for a few seconds and measure the performance that way ...

Thoughts or suggestions? May be an interesting discussion.

Answer 1

here is what we do to monitor and analyze client usage data...

• use Google Analytics to capture information about user (platforms, browsers, connection speeds, site usage, etc)

• use Google Webmaster Tools to get additional site stats and optimization suggestions

• use Pagespeed plugin to analyze/fine tune high volume and/or slow pages

• use Apache AB or JMeter - to run basic load tests against high volume pages