Visual Round Trip Analyzer
Recently I got introduced to this amazing tool by one of my colleagues and I just want to make sure I do my bit in spreading the awareness about this tool.
VRTA is one tool which can help you analyzing and improving the performance of your web site. VRTA examines the communications protocol, identifying the causes of excessive round-trips, and recommending solutions. Performance engineers, testers, developers, operations personnel should use VRTA to conduct their web performance analysis.
In the background VRTA tool captures the NETMON traces and does an automated analyses on the HTTP traffic captured during the collection phase.
VRTA provides a lot of recommendations which can help in improving the website’s end user response time but in this blog I will focus on couple of key points which I found very useful.
Feature number 1
VRTA tool lets you know the Average Compressibility of your website contents even when the contents are not served compressed from the web server. Isn't that cool feature..?
How does VRTA does this?
The VRTA tool compresses every file and then compares the new file size to the original downloaded. The ratio is shown Original KB / compressed KB.
Here is the snapshot of VRTA showing Average Compressibility.
Feature number 2
VRTA does a quick analyses on the captured network traces to find out the data packet loss during the communication between client and the server. To do such kind of checks one needs to have an in depth knowledge of analyzing the network traces but using VRTA this can be done automatically.
Recently I have used the VRTA tool to find out the reason of intermittent "Page cannot be displayed” error messages showing up on the client browsers. This issue turned out to be related to packet loss.
Here is a snapshot of the rule which analyze the network traces against the packet loss.
You can download VRTA from the below URL.