Test Caching With Warm Website Loads

DebugBear can test page performance for a warm load, where some of the page resources are already in the network cache.

Here are some example use cases for this feature:

• testing how quickly a web application loads when opened a second time
• testing how fast a product page loads if the user has already viewed the homepage

How to enable warm loads

In your page settings, click on Show advanced.

Then expand the Warm Load section and enable Disable clearing cache.

In most cases you can leave the Warm cache using test URL enabled. This option means that, if your test URL is http://example.com then DebugBear will load http://example.com to warm the cache.

More complex scenarios

What if you want to test a page where only some resources are already in the cache? For example, what if you want to test the speed of your About page if the user has previously loaded the website's homepage?

In these cases you can disable the Warm cache using test URL option. DebugBear will not take any steps to automatically warm the cache.

Instead, you can use the setup flows feature to warm the cache. For example, your setup flow might first load the homepage of your website before running a page test.

Why is page speed better for warm loads than cold loads?

Warm loads can re-use existing HTTP server connections and resources in the browser cache. As a result, the requests required to load important page content take a lot less time than for the first website visit.

In this request waterfall from a DebugBear test result, you can see that most resources are loaded from the browser cache. No data is transferred and the requests take just a few milliseconds to finish.