How do I know if I'm using too much javascript/jquery?

What ways can I test how my webpages run? How do I know what开发者_运维知识库 levels of usage (cpu and memory are what matters, I'm guessing) are acceptable?

Any advice to get me started?

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From a UI Standpoint, turn off javascript and see if your site works. If it doesn't, you've used too much....time to re-think your solutions.

And for the obligatory "that'll never happen" that will follow, yeah, there's users who still don't have JS turned on.....just like there's users who run IE6.

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Steve Souders is an excellent resource for keeping up on web site optimization. I'd suggest following his High Performance Web Sites blog. Here is a recent and thorough article to review: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/05/07/wpo-web-performance-optimization

Steve mentions Speed Tracer and dynaTrace Ajax Edition to test page performance.

Alternatively, you can record load times with Firefox Firebug plugin and/or Webkit's Developer Tools (Chrome, Safari, etc). Finally, YSlow is an amazing Firefox Firebug Plugin from Yahoo.

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Yahoo's YSlow is great for analyzing your pages and suggesting fixes to increase speed. Yahoo has also published some wonderful guidelines for making your pages fast: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

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Javascript is fast becoming a lighting fast language in all of the latest browsers, I've never had any problems. Even with endless setTimeout's at a 50ms interval you won't get any problems. The best test is to try it in Internet Explorer 6, if it usable there then you've no problems at all.