Website Loading Time

Measure the full website loading time for a particular URL using Nightmare JS/Electron. Other solutions are way too overblown; this quick and dirty script keeps things as simple as possible. Feel free to fork and adapt as desired!

Installation

npm install

Note that if you are running the script in a headless (server/CLI) environment, you'll need to install and run xvfb. On RedHat or CentOS, this would be accomplished with something like the following:

sudo yum install xorg-x11-server-Xvfb libXScrnSaver

Usage

node website-loading-time.js https://google.com

Constants are available within website-loading-time.js for modifying the following settings:

• Frequency (Integer)
• Timeout (Integer)
• Loading time sanity check threshold (Integer)
• Show browser (Boolean)
• Show errors (Boolean)
• Include timestamp (Boolean)
• NIXStats API Key (String)

Cron and xvfb Usage

We use this script in combination with xvfb on a headless machine (server) to check and report the actual loading times of one of our sites. This is the cron job we use; hopefully it helps you! This cron job uses flock to ensure that only one instance of the script is running at a time:

#Run website-loading-time.js on the server and report the loading time to NIXStats.
* * * * * /usr/bin/flock -n /tmp/website-loading-time.lockfile xvfb-run -a --server-args="-screen 0 1280x2000x24" node /home/rinogo/website-loading-time/website-loading-time.js https://google.com -- --progress=false --single-run --watch=false

Example output

Full output

website-loading-time rinogo$ node website-loading-time.js https://google.com
1569876956500	1657
1569876971524	967
1569876986529	1179
1569877001535	1005
1569877016541	1084
1569877031546	Error: Navigation timed out after 4000 ms
1569877046551	1076
...

Loading times only (no timestamps or errors)

website-loading-time rinogo$ node website-loading-time.js https://google.com
1657
967
1179
1005
1084
1076
...