I’m at Velocity 2008 right now and the keynote I was most excited about this morning introduced http://webpagetest.org/.
This site accepts a URL which it loads over a network connection with the speed of your choice. After loading the site it offers you a waterfall graph of page elements, a screenshot so you can see if it loaded correctly, and automatic comparisons to previous page loads to see how caching affects your site.
The code behind the page is based on the open source AOL Pagetest which means it can be modified as needed. I think I heard Ryan say something about automated testing over time with historical graphs and email alerts? 
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It is pretty cool. Too bad it’s for IE only
Why do so many large companies write tools for IE?
We’ll just need to create a Firefox plugin that can gather results from ySlow and report them!
Sorry, we created it for IE because Firefox already has a boatload of useful tools and the bulk of our visitors are on IE (and trust me, Firefox gets plenty of use by devas the sites are being built). We need to create a Firefox version at some point, it just hasn’t been on the short list to do. If someone wants to create an equivalent plugin for firefox I am willing to run hosted testing on the same equipment and offer different browsers as a test option.
What wasn’t presented but is also part of the source package on sourceforge (http://pagetest.sourceforge.net) is the automation harness that we put around pagetest for doing repetitive testing. The results are in a format suitable for databasing and trending/notifying (that part we haven’t released as it’s really not all that polished and very AOL-specific but if anyone wants to take on building a reporting/alarming interface I’m willing to help out where I can).
There’s a “Send Us Feedback” link at the bottom of the webpagetest.org site that has my e-mail address if you need to reach me.
-Pat
I would also recommend this online free tool: http://Site-Perf.com/
It measure loading speed of page and it’s requisites (images/js/css) like browsers do and shows nice detailed chart - so you can easily spot bottlenecks.
Also very useful thing is that this tool is able to verify network quality of your server (packet loss level and ping delays).
Thanks Zuborg! That site helped me out a lot.
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