Measurement of AJAX Based applications

Many times the applications are coming up with AJAX Based interface. The usual tools do not address the issues related with the rendering time which an application takes as load testing measure only on the network side.
Can you please tell me that how do you guys address this issue?

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Great to see this post! I do agree that load testing AJAX applications can give you performance measurements that don’t reflect the real user behavior. Especially Microsoft browsers IE6 and IE7 struggle with AJAX and JS. Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox or better in dealing with AJAX. The issue with load test tools is that these measure browser traffic and do not take into account the rendering of the page on client side. The rendering can – in some cases – take way longer than the actual HTML response. Development organizations should be aware of the issues around AJAX and IE as a different way of programming might fix these issues. To answer your question how to take the rendering into account using Load Test tools….. that will be difficult. One option could be to develop the same load test scripts with a functional test tool (GUI Base) and execute these in parallel with your load tests. The GUI tool can give you the exact performance measurements including the rendering of the pages.
I’m afraid no easy solution is available. Hope there will be more replies on your post.

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AJAX is a key area that load testing misses he critical client time.
However if a page was complex and difficult render in the browser that time is also skipped. Tradition has load script just add a "think time " included render and other operations.

One workaround if can generate the correct server interactions and are happy that your server load is a good approximation. Then hand time a real session and ensure good interactive and AJAX performance.

Ian