New Features: Ad-hoc testing, around the world, on multiple devices

Wish you could quickly run a once-off test to see if your changes made a performance impact?

Today I'm releasing several new features to make performance testing your websites even simpler.

Ad-hoc Testing

To test at any time:

1. Click into a Site, and click on the Results tab.
2. From there, click Queue Test, and a single test will run for only the specified page, device, and region.
3. Once you click it, you should see a new result appear, with the status of "In Progress", as below:

Test against multiple devices, from multiple regions

In the past, PerfBeacon would only monitor your site from an emulated mobile. As of today, you can also monitor your site from a desktop. Handy if most of your traffic comes from desktops anyway.

As well as this, you can simultaneously track your site from every region that PerfBeacon runs in. This is useful if you want to figure out if your CDN has any gaps.

1. For an existing site, click into a site, and click on the Settings tab.
2. You should see this screen:
3. In the dropdowns, select the combination of devices and regions that you would like to test in.

Disable Scheduling

PerfBeacon was initially built to monitor webpages on a schedule.

From today, if you only want to test your site when it changes, that's possible too.

1. Click into your Site, then click on the Settings tab.
2. From there, click on the Test Frequency dropdown, and select "Never", as below: