Good tools to record network usage of a web application

Question

I am about to start work on a project to reduce the bandwidth usage of a web application. We are going to implement several techniques such as delayed loading of Javascript files until they are needed to try and reduce the overhead of running the application.

The first thing I want to do is test the current state of things so we can create a baseline. Ideally we would then like to automate this testing so that we can track the network usage of the application as we make our changes.

Can anyone suggest tools which are good at doing this? At it's most basic the tool needs to be manually run but extra brownie points will be given for suggestions of how to automate the test!

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Firebug (especially the Network Tab will show you everything a page loads with times and sizes.

You might also take a look at YSlow.

Answer 2

I would just use the logs of IIS. It's possible to log to text files. Then you can analyze your data with this tool.

If you don't want to get fancy, you can log via ODBC to a database, and query with plain SQL.