Graphing requests with Tamper Data
17th October 2006
I spent the weekend in Boston, speaking at GBC/ACM’s Deep Ajax seminar with Alex Russell and Adrian Holovaty. I’ll be posting some notes on this later, but I wanted to share a really neat Firefox extension that Alex showed me: Tamper Data.
Tamper Data is an extension for intercepting HTTP requests and modifying them. I have very little interest in this functionality myself, but hidden deep within the extension is the ability to do this:
That’s a graph showing what happens when you load up www.yahoo.com. It shows every component of the page—JavaScript, CSS, images—and when each component started and finished loading. You can use it to get an idea for how long it took between the HTML starting to load and the browser beginning to pull in the CSS, then the images, and so on. It’s a superb visualization of what happens when a page is loaded.
Unfortunately, if you install and run the extension (Tools -> Tamper Data) you’ll see this instead:
To get the graph, you have to right click in the main data grid and select “Graph All” from the context menu. Be sure to hit “clear” before loading a page that you want to graph or you’ll end up seeing data from other pages too (you should shut down GMail or similar to prevent their polling requests from polluting the graph).
It’s a great tool but it’s pretty well hidden. If you’re looking for a side project, implementing the same functionality in a smaller extension (maybe as an extra tab in the Page Info screen) would be a significant service to the web development community.
More recent articles
- Weeknotes: the aftermath of NICAR - 16th March 2024
- The GPT-4 barrier has finally been broken - 8th March 2024
- Prompt injection and jailbreaking are not the same thing - 5th March 2024
- Interesting ideas in Observable Framework - 3rd March 2024
- Weeknotes: Getting ready for NICAR - 27th February 2024
- The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is video - 21st February 2024
- Weeknotes: a Datasette release, an LLM release and a bunch of new plugins - 9th February 2024
- Datasette 1.0a8: JavaScript plugins, new plugin hooks and plugin configuration in datasette.yaml - 7th February 2024
- LLM 0.13: The annotated release notes - 26th January 2024
- Weeknotes: datasette-test, datasette-build, PSF board retreat - 21st January 2024