Investigate a way to more accurately test and measure Web Endpoints
After some recent deep diving into k6
it's become clear when testing Web endpoints that k6
only measures the initial server response time that servers the web page. It doesn't perform any rendering or execute any dynamic scripts (e.g. javascript) that in turn woul typically result in more web endpoint requests being made by the browser to load the webpage.
This is by design for k6
and from research most load testing tools. Their purpose is to load test and measure server response times and not render the page.
SiteSpeed on the other hand does measure page renders but only does so with a single user., i.e. not at scale. There doesn't appear to be a tool on the market at this time that does "both". The reasoning likely for this is it would take substantial resource to run full browsers at scale like SiteSpeed does.
Nonetheless we're currently only testing Web endpoints partially. One approach to resolve this would be to extract all main http calls a specific page makes and add them into the relevant k6
test to measure all of the server calls that takes place coupled with a equivalent SiteSpeed test (on performance-sitespeed) that also measures the rendering time. With this approach we'll get to test both the server side (k6
) and the client side (sitespeed
).