Cuzillion: 'cuz there's a zillion pages to check

Once in a while I get lucky. Most recently, this means that I was asked to write a blog post for LinkedInabout the tech talk Steve Souders gave for us last week: Even Faster Web Sites. Unfortunately, in the interests of brevity, I couldn’t dive on something incidental to the talk which fascinated me: Cuzillion.

Cuzillion is one of those headslappers Steve seems to produce on a regular basis; it’s a tool to model web pages and experiment with load order and methodology in order to better understand performance bottlenecks and find your way to a solution. He uses it to illustrate examples in his talks of late (as he did in the slides for his talk at LinkedIn), which highlights another feature: the ability to share a precise example among the team seeking a solution. It fascinates me because it’s so straightforward and so obviously useful, yet you can twiddle it to great depth, willfully violating all the well-known best practices, and see clearly why that’s not a good idea. It’s like checkers: you get the basics instantly, and yet there’s so much more there.

After playing with it for a while, it occurred to me that I very much want to say, “Cuzillion, go model the way this web page loads so I can play with it.” When Steve announced Cuzillion, he mentioned that he intends to set up a Google Code repo for Cuzillion; when he gets around to that, it might be fun to spend a little time adding that feature.

Check it.