Wim Leers Freelance Drupal Developer

In this article, I explain what was required to integrate the Episodes page loading performance monitoring system with Drupal.
Episodes was written by Steve Souders, whom is well-known for his research on high performance web sites and has authored multiple books on this subject.

The work I am doing as part of bachelor thesis on improving Drupal's page loading performance should be practical, not theoretical. It should have a real-world impact.

To ensure that that also happens, I wrote the Episodes module. This module integrates the Episodes framework for timing web pages (see the “Episodes” section in my “Page loading profiling tools” article) with Drupal on several levels – all without modifying Drupal core:

In this article, seven distinctly different page loading profiling tools are compared: UA Profiler, Cuzillion, YSlow, Hammerhead, Apache JMeter, Gomez/Keynote/WebMetrics/Pingdom, Jiffy and Episodes. "Profiling" must be interpreted rather broadly: some of the tools cannot measure actual performance but are useful to gain insight in page loading performance characteristics.

If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.
— Lord Kelvin

The same applies to page loading performance: if you cannot measure it, you cannot know which parts have the biggest effect and thus deserve your focus. So before doing any real work, we will have to figure out which tools can help us analyzing page loading performance.

In my session at DrupalCon DC, I promised an initial version of the Episodes module by March 15, which is today. I'm glad to be able to announce that I somewhat met that goal.

If you don't know what it is exactly, I encourage you to read the project description first.

Status

It's not yet completely finished: the basic reporting UI must still be written. But you can already look at the results of each individual page through the Firebug add-on (which I didn't write, it's already available). See the first screenshot for that. That's of course much less useful, but it gives you a clear indication of the potential.
However, before I do that, I first have to work on making other deadlines for other courses.
So what's done already? Here's an overview: