Steve Souders, member of
the performance group at Google, has released a new open source tool called Cuzillion. Steve
was constantly creating sample test web pages that he used to test out theories on Web site
performance. He realized that he was repeating a lot of the same steps, so why not create a
tool that would enable him to build the samples quickly. Thus, Cuzillion was born.
If you take a look at the UI above, you will see that it is mimicking a Web page, with a
<HEAD> and <BODY>. On the left hand side you select types of
elements; such as images, scripts, CSS, and other resources. You add these elements to the
mini page on the right, and then you can select that element to set more properties on it. For
example, you can quickly set the domain that it is running on, which allows you to test
splitting our content on domains.
We sat down with Steve and produced
the video below in two parts. It starts off with him discussing the project, and then delves
into a screencast of the product itself. He gives us an introduction, and then shows how he
used it to solve an issue with Orkut.
