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Website monitoring service?

Does anyone know a free or relatively low-cost website monitoring service? I've found many that will monitor server uptime, but nothing that seems to monitor average pageload times, and my boss is really on my case to get stats on how fast our sites are loading. I've googled just about every search term I can think of, but keep coming up empty handed.

Update:

Just to clarify, I'm looking for a service that monitors how long it is taking for pages to load on average ... not general traffic statistics.

Update 2:

Asking out hosting provider is out... we are our hosting provider. Our server is in-house and we operate and maintain it ourselves.

I realize that I can measure the load time on our own network, but my boss wants stats throughout the day, and sitting at my desk refreshing all day is out of the question... and it tells me nothing about users outside our company network, of course. I keep telling her that I've never heard of such a service, but she won't accept that as a viable answer, so I'm hoping someone else has some knowledge that I don't.

5 Answers

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  • Anonymous
    1 decade ago
    Favourite answer

    It's unclear what you mean by "page load time."

    >> If you mean, how long, from the time your server receives a POST, GET, HEAD, etc. request from a visitor, to the time your server has parsed its response stream and sent a response header back to the client, then you can monitor that several ways:

    1. If you are using Apache, you can use ab to benchmark your server's performance:

    http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html

    There's also a metrics API you can download as an Apache package:

    http://hadoop.apache.org/core/docs/r0.17.2/api/org...

    2. If you are using PHP, you can easily determine the time of a script's execution using this method:

    http://www.webdesign.org/web/web-programming/php/s...

    3. If you want to track how long it take to run an ASP.NET page, you can use the Trace class:

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y13fw6we(V...

    >> If you define "load time" as the period of time between when a Web browser sends a request header to your server and the page has completed loading on that client's computer, you can do that with jQuery, using a simple AJAX script like this:

    <script type="text/javascript">

    $(document).ready( function() {

    var now = new Date();

    $.get("page.html", function(data) {

    var then = new Date();

    var seconds = (then.getTime() - now.getTime()) / 1000;

    alert('The AJAX request took ' + seconds + ' seconds.');

    });

    });

    </script>

    If you are looking for a more integrated management solution, you can try one of these open-source solutions:

    http://www.opensourcetesting.org/performance.php

    Otherwise, you can search for "Web server benchmarking" (since that is what you describe) and find all sorts of suggestions and services.

  • Brad
    Lv 4
    1 decade ago

    Usually the web provider would have statistics about the up time of a site and what not. As for how fast the page loads, it all depends on some ones ISP and their PC. Basically how fast it is is what it comes down to. You can time how long it takes to load on your own computer, but thats about it. If there were to be any sort of tool like that, your web provider would probably have it, or at least have most of the information you are looking for.

  • Anonymous
    1 decade ago

    Here's a webtool that does it:

    http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyz...

    Page load times are relative to the client. That metric isn't very accurate because it is measured by an outside service. Also, If the user has visited before the page file and graphics will be sometimes be cached on his machine. If the page is cached it loads more quickly then if it isn't. This metric is best measured on your server. You should be able to measure page load times for your actual visitors. You need to talk to your web host or your server administrator.

  • 1 decade ago

    I don't know if they have exactly what you need but you might look into Google Analytics. It is free and easy to implement.

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