Episodes

Work is being done on version 2 of the Episodes library, which supports the WebTiming spec. This will be integrated ASAP in this Drupal module!

Episodes is a module that includes the identically named Episodes framework in Drupal. Episodes allows you to measure episodes in a web page's loading sequence. Hence its name.

It works by embedding some JavaScript code in the web page. This code then measures how long the different episodes take to load. Finally, the results are sent back to a web server (logged through Apache). This can be a different server than the one Drupal runs on.
Because it's JavaScript, it's run in actual browsers, which means the results give you an accurate representation of the real-world page loading performance of your web pages. It's not perfect, amongst others because you cannot accurately measure time through JavaScript, but give or take a few milliseconds, it's accurate. And that's what we really need.

This module provides easy integration with Drupal. It automatically creates an episode for each JavaScript behavior defined in Drupal.behaviors. You can disable Episodes for specific behaviors or on certain paths. Basic reports (with charts!) are also provided (e.g. average page load time per day for the last month).

Episodes (the JavaScript, thus also this Drupal module) is designed to run on production web sites. Otherwise the measurements wouldn't be based on real-world circumstances and would therefor be inaccurate or even meaningless. So it's meant to be a continuous performance monitoring tool. So it's not unlike Google Analytics in the way it's mean to be used

The goal of this framework is to become an industry standard. And it's likely that it'll manage to do just that, because the author and driving force behind it is Steve Souders himself. Drupal is the first CMF/CMS to support it.

This module was written as part of the bachelor thesis of Wim Leers at Hasselt University.