Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
Common HTTP Tracing Export Format
Category: Performance, Utility
Steve Souders: “Hey Dion, Facebook is doing something wacky on their category pages. Take a look at the waterfall that you see in this data that I exported from AOL PageTest”
Dion Almaer: “Interesting. I just imported it into Firebug, and I see what you mean.”
Well, Jan Odvarko of the Firebug team is working on just that:
There is currently several existing tools that can be used for HTTP tracking. To name a few:
- Firebug (in browser)
- HTTPWatch (in browser)
- Fiddler (proxy based)
- Netmon (network level)
- Wireshark (network level)
They have various advantages over each other. For example, in-browser tools can easily group requests by page and analyze browser-cache usage while network-level tools can easily gather low level detailed info (e.g. HTTP compression). But in general, they all can be used to track HTTP traffic.
It would be obviously very beneficial to have a common export/import format that is used across all HTTP tracing tools and perhaps other projects. This would allow effective processing and analyzing data coming from various sources.
I have put together a document (fist draft) that represents a proposal for HTTP Trace Data export/import format (based on HTTPWatch’s structure, but designed for JSON). Any comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated!
I hope this happens.
Related Content:
“I hope this happens.”
Make it happen Dion ;)
I second that, but I wonder, what’s wrong with pcap?
“What if we lived in a world where”
But can we afford the “in a world” guy to do the voice-over?
Don’t forget HttpFox! It’s the inbrowser equivalent of Wireshark. If you’re only doing web sniffing, then you don’t need all of the power of Wireshark, so you can just install HttpFox, which gives you much more information the Firebug net panel.
@Joeri, I think the “in a world” guy is actually dead, so we’re good there :p
This is a great concept, hope to see it in real world usage soon.