Can I use the browser Navigation Timing API for Ajax events in single page apps? If not, what's a good tool?

Question

We\'ve got a single page app built with Knockout and Backbone which makes Ajax calls to the server and does some complex data caching and DOM rendering. We\'re really like t

Answer 1

The Navigation Timing API is in my opinion not really helpful when it comes to measuring single page application performance.

Along with the already mentioned User Timing API, the Resource Timing API is actually much more helpful. This API provides functionality to retrieve the timings for all requests made in a user session (actually all you see in the network tabs of the developer tools in most browsers). These timings include Round-Trip times as well as DNS-lookup times etc.

Unfortunately, this is a relatively new specification and is not yet implemented accross all browsers. Chrome and IE > 10 provide implementations (although not yet complete). Surprisingly, IE seems to have implemented the most unitl now...