Discussion Questions

Read the wprof paper for background material on web page load process, but the paper is not essential to providing a response to any one of the tasks listed below. Please post your response at http://hydralisk.cs.washington.edu.

  1. There are many tools out there for analyzing web page loads. For example, most browsers have developer tools for analyzing the web page load process. (In Chrome, you can choose Developer Tools menu option and then load a page to see the waterfall of the page download. Or you can use webpagetest.org to collect a waterfall diagram from a vantage point controlled by webpagetest.org.) Use one of these tools on your favorite (or not so favorite) website, analyze the results, and report on the most interesting things you learned from doing that. Also feel free to share on the discussion board any tools that you came across which might be of interest to others.
  2. Steve Souders maintains a very interesting blog on web page performance. Work through any of the articles on his blog and report on what you think were the key takeaways from the post.