How to approach “end-client” performance testing on single-page (web) applications?

Question

We are evaluating how to test performance on a single-page application (SPA) which relies heavily on JavaScript and dynamic content (updated via Ajax).

Popular load-

Answer 1

Check out JMeter WebDriver http://jmeter-plugins.org/wiki/WebDriverTutorial/ . You can define one parallel to your load test in order to gauge performance perceived by the client while the server is under load.

From their site:

Web Driver Sampler automates the execution and collection of Performance metrics on the Browser (client-side). A large part of performance testing, up to this point, has been on the server side of things. However, with the advancement of technology, HTML5, JS and CSS improvements, more and more logic and behaviour have been pushed down to the client. This adds to the overall perceived performance of website/webapp, but this metric is not available in JMeter. Things that add to the overall browser execution time may include:

Client-side Javascript execution - eg. AJAX, JS templates CSS transforms - eg. 3D matrix transforms, animations 3rd party plugins - eg. Facebook like, Double click ads, site analytics, etc All these things add to the overall browser execution time, and this project aims to measure the time it takes to complete rendering all this content.