Use a Header Tool to Monitor HTTP Requests
One of the best tools in your diagnostic arsenal is an HTTP Header monitoring plug-in, available for both IE and Firefox. My personal favorite for IE is IE Inspector’s HTTP Analyzer.
All web pages require many HTTP requests to fully load a page – after the HTML is loaded, all the associated style sheets, JavaScript files, and images have to be loaded. The Plumtree Portal login page alone causes the browser to make 27 HTTP requests to the server the first time. Monitoring HTTP requests can provide very valuable information, such as:
- Observing how long the request time is for the portal page itself
- Observing how long the total request time is for the browser to download ALL files
- Observing the size of the various files being transmitted
- Observe AJAX requests and other configuration settings
- Identifying broken images, .js files, and other components that are referenced on the page but not found on the server (404 errors)
- Monitor page redirections to identify portal behavior, such as what happens from the browser’s perspective during an SSO login
Note that many administrators focus most of their time on optimizing the PORTAL response time, but don’t spend enough time looking at the entire page load, where many other optimizations can be made. In the coming weeks we’ll discuss many of these optimizations that you can observe simply by using a tool like this!
