AJAX is an amazing bit of technology, and a boon to Web performance.
The question is, how do you accurately measure it?
Now, from the perspective of synthetic transaction measurement, AJAX destroys the foundational concept of the “Page”, as it is built on the concept of the “sequence”. “Pages” assume a whole new HTML document is loaded in each step, where a “sequence” simply tracks the specific flow of steps that the customer performs, regardless of whether they occur in a new HTML document or not.
In this respect, passive monitoring services currently have a distinct advantage over synthetic measurement, because they intrinsically track the sequence of event that a customer triggers, rather than the pages that are downloaded. I will not declare the death of synthetic Web performance measurement yet (my day job is with one the largest synthetic Web performance measurement companies); but the industry has to re-evaluate many of its core precepts.
AJAX is a technology that will definitely benefit from the blending of passive and synthetic performance measurement into a single usable stream of information that companies can act on. With this blend, companies can determine how their servers are responding, as well as what customers are doing, tracking the flow of business data in real-time.
What will be interesting to watch is how the synthetic measurement companies (including the one I work for) respond to this. One of the companies in our space says that they handle it now, but I have yet to see the results of their effort and how they really implement it in the field.
How are you and your team measuring the performance of your AJAX applications?
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