Google + Tag1

Overview

Born as a result of an ongoing collaboration between the Google Chrome team and Tag1 Consulting, Drupal's performance and scalability are getting a major boost with Gander the open source automated performance testing framework, designed and led by Drupal core release and framework manager Nathaniel Catchpole. The system will greatly benefit the development of the Drupal platform itself and, as an open-source tool, enable end-users of Drupal to integrate performance testing into their DevOps toolchain, delivering a substantial competitive advantage to sites powered by Drupal.

The Google Chrome team chose Tag1 as one of its key partners for improving web performance because of Drupal's strong foothold on the web, especially among some of the most highly trafficked sites online today.

When the Google Chrome team first approached the Drupal Association about improving the performance of the Open Web, Tag1 was an obvious choice as partner. Tag1 has been and are pioneers in web performance at scale, and have the knowledge and expertise to bring a robust automated performance testing system to Drupal.

What is Gander?

Gander is an open source automated performance testing framework, which has been part of Drupal core since 10.2 and allows us to monitor performance across time and ensure that performance regressions aren't unknowingly re-introduced. Gander isn't limited to core development, so anyone can start using it today!

Why should I use it?

Performance is important, but often overlooked. Experience shows that many organizations neglect performance aspects of their projects until problems pile up to the extent that makes them impossible to ignore. At that point it is often very difficult to reverse the trend due to large technical debt and cultural aspects, which results in months or even years of effort to take the performance of the project back on the right track.

Performance, on the other hand, has a significant and direct impact on the business outcomes. Research shows that even minor performance regressions turn users away, directly resulting in narrower reach and a negative impact on the bottom line.

We already have tools and metrics to reliably measure end user performance experience. Core Web Vitals are becoming an industry standard and anyone can check how their website is performing using tools like PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse. The main disadvantage of these tools is that we use them retroactively. We would prefer a tool that will detect performance regressions even before it will reach end users.

Gander lets us do exactly that. By incorporating it into existing CI/CD pipelines we ensure that it runs and regularly checks performance of a project during the development cycle. Depending on how it is used it will let us monitor metrics over time and compare them to the baseline (does a change X perform better or worse than the current release, how do releases perform against each other, …) or even fail the automated test suite as soon as one of the important metrics exceeds the threshold that we consider satisfactory.

How it can be used.

A Gander performance test is an extension of a standard functional test, which will additionally collect the following performance metrics during the page lifecycle:

• Time to first byte (TTFB)
• Largest contentful paint (LCP)
• First contentful paint (FCP)
• Number of database queries
• Number of JavaScript files
• Number of CSS stylesheet files
• List of database queries