Measuring Websites

GMT can also measure websites and takes a multi-dimensional approach here:

  • The energy of the browser is measured to display and render the page
  • The network transfer energy is measured that was needed to download the HTML and page assets

To isolate this as best as possible GMT orchestrates a reverse proxy, warms up the cache by pre-loading the full page once and only then does the final measurement.

Warning: Measuring websites is very tricky! GMT shaves off some of the caveats by using reverse proxys and cache pre-loading to make results more reliable. Since measurement load times are in milliseconds range you must have Metric Providers with very high sampling_rates connected. 2ms is a good value. Also website measurements are really only realiable in a controlled cluster with accuracy control.

Quick website measuring

Since measuring websites is so common GMT comes with a quick measurement function for that.

In the root folder you find the run-template.sh file.

Measure a sample query like this: bash run-template.sh website "https://www.green-coding.io"

It will download the needed containers, setup them up and run the measurement. Once you got this quick measurement running iterate on it by extending the example measurement file with more steps, for instance measuring all the sub-pages on your domain

Bonus tip: If you apply --quick to the run-template.sh call the measurement is quicker for debugging purposes. However results will be not as reliable. Use only for debugging!

Trying out our hosted service

We operate website-tester.green-coding.io as a simple demo vertical that uses the underlying Green Metrics Tool Cluster Hosted Service →.

Check it out if you do not feel like installing the GMT and just want to get carbon and energy info on a single page.

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