Steve Souders, the web performance evangelist at Google, taught a course last year at Stanford’s Computer Science Department based on his highly regarded ‘High Performance Web Sites’ book. The course materials including slides, notes and labs are available from Steve’s web site.

A video has also been released of the first lecture of the course :

Steve Souders' High Performance Web Sites Course

In the first few minutes, Steve uses HttpWatch running in Firefox to compare the performance of competing pairs of web sites including MySpace and Facebook, MSN and AOL, and the Google and Yahoo search engines.

Jake Howlett at CodeStore has written an interesting post about how he used HttpWatch Basic Edition to diagnose a customer’s performance problem:

To record the HTTP transaction log I had them install the free Basic Edition of HttpWatch. All they had to do then was start recording, open the application, open a new form, open a new document, edit the document, save the document etc and then stop recording. The result is a .HWL file which I can then open in my version of HttpWatch’s “Studio”. I can then see all headers, response code and the amount of time taken for all transactions involved.

The Professional Edition of HttpWatch allowed him to look at the customer’s log file and find the cause of the performance problem by looking at the HTTP response headers returned by the server.