An evaluation of HTTP statistics tools

Hi All,

We have evaluated following tools, I hope the following table by the team would be a good reference.

Features	Fiddler	Firebug	HTTPWatch
Response time spilt up for each request(component wise)	Yes	Yes	Yes
Bytes Transferred	Yes	Yes	Yes
Browser render time(Separate Measurement)	No	No	No
Time to Last byte	Yes	No	No
Time to first byte	Yes	Yes*	Yes
End User Response Time	Yes	Yes	Yes
Network Latency Breakup	Yes	Yes	Yes
Filtering Urls	Yes	No	Yes
Javascript Profiling	No	Yes	No
Allowing Breakpoints Depending on type of Methods	Yes	No	No
Page Source of Request	No	Yes	Yes
Binary View of the Request	Yes	No	No
HTML view of the request	Yes	Yes	No
Decompressing Incoming Request	Yes	No	No
Save recorded sessions	Yes	No	Yes

*"Waiting for response" given by Firebug corresponds to

• time for the request to travel from the browser to the server
• plus time for the request to be processed by the server (ie, time to generate the whole page)
• plus time for the first byte of data travelling from the server to the browser.

Firebug reports DNS Lookup, Connecting time,Queing time,Waiting for response, Recieving Data, DOMContentLoaded, load.

• HTTPWatch Reports the following properties of the request

Elapsed Time

Network Round Trips

Downloaded Data

Uploaded Data

HTTP Compression Savings

DNS Lookups

TCP Connects

• In HTTPWatch the TimeChart tab gives the Network breakup and shows Blocked, Send, Wait, Receive,TTFB,Network times.With licensed version of HTTPWatch, HTTPWatch Professional we can get the TimeChart tab enabled.

• Filtering traffic from specific url is possible in HTTPWatch and Fiddler but that feature is not there in Firebug.

Thanks to Sarvani, Pramod for their research.