Re: WebPerf WG call - May 27th 10am PST

Belatedly, the minutes
<https://w3c.github.io/web-performance/meetings/2021/2021-05-27/index.html>
and presentation recording <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Oq6SCPesKc>
for this call are now published.

Copying the minutes here for convenience:
WebPerfWG call - May 27th 2021
Participants

   - Yoav Weiss, Nic Jansma, Alex Christensen, Nicolás Peña Moreno, Carine
   Bournez, Patrick Hamann, Sean Feng, Michelle Vu, Noam Helfman, Hongbo Song,
   Annie Sullivan, Giacomo Zecchini, Steven Bougon, Benjamin De Kosnik

Next Meeting

   - June 10th 10am PST / 1pm EST

Minutes

   - Presentation will be recorded, but discussion afterwards will not be

Web Perf APIs for responsiveness
<https://www.google.com/url?q=https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BPLovkf3scWzY68yamHIHWUX4jZ1WRZNTKFlhK0gE5M/&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1623838462550000&usg=AOvVaw0wxlacdqpzz0vNLYsP9R8Y>
-
Nicolás

   - *nicolás*: Goals: assess responsiveness of a webpage
   - ... Current metric used in CWV: FID
   - ... Problems: Only captures the first input, not interactions after
   the first one
   - ... Only looks at input delay, not how long it takes for input to be
   processed
   - ... Does not measure scrolling at all
   - ... Using an Event's duration, as part of PerformanceEventTiming
   interface
   - ... Delta between event timeStamp to the next rendering update after
   event handlers have run (after event has been dispatched), from the
   beginning till the first yellow star
   -
   - ... Capturing async work is difficult, so now focusing on event
   duration, which is the minimal duration it’d take for users to see a
   response
   - ... How can we aggregate events across the page?
   - … different number of events depending on the interaction
   - ... Aggregation by considering all events equal does not make sense,
   keyboard keydown/press/up are part of the same interaction
   - ... Clicks/taps have more events associated with them but they're a
   single user interaction
   - ... We want to consider tap/keyboard to be equally weighted
   - ... Measure something that is user perceptible, which is not
   individual DOM events but the actual interaction they did
   - ... Look at the user interactions themselves
   - ... Could also be a drag event
   - ... For these interactions we'd like to find something similar to
   duration but they're not events, so we need to define something about
   how long they take
   - ... For these slides, I'm calling them latency
   - ... One option: Use maximum duration of any associated event
   - ... Other option: Use non-overlapping sum of durations of events
   - ... Example from pressing key and releasing it
   -
   - ... Key press takes more than a single frame
   - ... In this case key down duration is separate from key up duration
   (non-overlapping)
   - ... How can a web developer calculate this right now?
   - ... Problems for a web developer: We have a minimum duration threshold
   (e.g. 16ms), where anything less is not surfaced to the API
   - ... Would have to use event counts somehow to count those properly
   - ... Only receiving DOM events you got, you'd have to match/group into
   interactions they correspond to
   - ... Can try to do this via event timestamps, but this is not an easy
   process
   - ... Proposing interactionID, a new attribute for interface where it
   has an ID that is shared across corresponding entries from the same
   interaction
   - ... Other issue is measuring scrolling
   - ... We want to include scroll latency
   - ... Latency is just the scroll update, from trigger of scroll to first
   render after that
   - ... No real DOM events associated with this latency
   - ... Scroll can be performed without going to JavaScript thread so it's
   not blocked on DOM handlers
   - ... For WebPerf APIs, we'd need scroll latency
   - ... Options: Have a new PerformanceEventTiming entry with a name equal
   to 'scroll' or 'scrollBegin' (name right now is event type)
   - ... Other option is have a new Scroll Timing API where we expose the
   latency we want
   - ... Benefit of another API is it could be nicer to augment in the
   future
   - *Yoav*: Looking for opinions on API shape for scrolls?
   - *nicolás*: Two questions would be thoughts on scrolling, and thoughts
   on EventTiming threshold/interactionID
   - ... Worry with changing minimum duration threshold is that it could
   become too noisy
   - ... Would offer enabling filtering by event type, which would save
   developer time and would be better for performance
   - … Avoid getting callbacks for entries you don’t care about
   - *Nic*: Any other observer APIs that allow you to pre-filter or specify
   a filter?
   - *nicolás*: I don’t think we do
   - *Nic*: So you’d need to specify the event types?
   - *nicolás*: Yeah, in the observe call. We already have duration to
   query only for durations you care about. Would that be confusing?
   - *Nic*: No, was just looking for precedents. Seems reasonable.
   - *nicolás*: We know that this is important for long tasks, so that kind
   of filtering may be useful for other entry types. And we do have the
   observer dictionary where we could set the types
   - *Noam*: Been using Event Timing for a few months now, and never needed
   event duration smaller than 100ms, but never dealt with grouping of related
   events. My intention was to minimize the number of events and 100ms was
   good enough for that - just filter all events below that. But I like the
   idea of interaction ID for grouping
   - … Why do we need to capture all events? What’s the use case?
   - *nicolás*: the idea is: if you’re tapping on a website, developer can
   perform the work in any of the events that are being dispatched. The idea
   is to help with the metric being agnostic to the way the site is
   implemented.
   - … FID looks at the first discrete interaction with the page, which is
   probably meaningful. So it doesn’t include hover events, as they are not
   typically meaningful.
   - … It’s with that constraint that we want to measure interactivity,
   where we think an interaction ID can be meaningful
   - … Grouping by interaction ID can help RUM providers
   - ... Noam: But why smaller durations?
   - *nicolás*: Events not present would have a duration of zero
   - *Noam*: The challenge - if not all events are captured because of the
   duration threshold (missing all events below that), if we want to calculate
   the percentage of the responsive events, you can’t really do that. Do you
   calculate the relative percentiles - if you dropped 90% of the events, you
   can calculate the 95 %ile by finding the p50 of the captured events. We can
   count the totals from the event handler
   - *nicolás*: Makes sense. Another use case for the minimum duration - if
   you want to compute FID from BFCache, whatever you get is not guaranteed to
   be the first, as events could’ve been dropped. But it may not be related to
   the discussion.
   - … Other ways to solve this is just firing the first input. So no
   minimum duration makes sense
   - Sean:Like the idea of interactionID, but do we really need to expose
   it? If we see the key down, is that not enough? What’s the use case of
   calculating latency and grouping the events together?
   - *nicolás*: The use case is focused on analytics and browser metrics -
   analytics provider wants to provide data on the site without having control
   over the content. If you have no control over the content and still make
   sense of event timing data, this can help you aggregate entries together.
   - *Annie*: Metrics try to measure what the user is experiencing -
   interaction ID brings us closer to the user experience
   - *Sean*: If you know that key down is slow, you’d still be able to tell
   - *Annie*: You’d need to understand what the page is doing, which is not
   always true
   - *Noam*: question regarding scrolling - we correlate event handlers
   based on the event timestamps and event timing timestamps and figure out
   what the user did. I’m trying to think how that would work for scroll. The
   timestamp on the scroll event won’t match any event timestamp.
   - *nicolás*: The timestamp we’d use for scroll latency would be
   something like a mouse move, which is not exposed in event timing
   - *Noam*: But there’s also mouse wheel, touch, etc.
   - *nicolás*: yeah, and the scroll event cannot be used because it’s
   dispatched later
   - *Noam*: So how so we correlate between the event timing entry and the
   operation the user did? We can expose the target so we know which dom
   element was scrolled on, but e.g. I wouldn’t know if it’s a
   horizontal/vertical scroll. Need a way to correlate between what happened
   and the event timing entry
   - *nicolás*: sounds like you’re arguing for the second option, because
   you’d need extra information
   - *Noam*: I would need extra information on the scroll event. Maybe we
   need a scroll ID? It’s another correlation problem similar to the
   interaction ID
   - *nicolás*: not entirely sure
   - *Alex*: What exactly do you want to measure when measuring scroll
   timing? It’s simple for mousewheel/click where you have a single event. But
   the world has changed and we have continuous scrolling and you can have
   events that can cause you to scroll up and down for ~10 seconds. What would
   we measure?
   - *nicolás*: The initial scroll latency. The first frame that the scroll
   initiated.
   - *Alex*: makes sense. It’s a complicated problem with many moving
   parts, threads, etc
   - *nicolás*: yeah. Which makes Noam’s question even more interesting
   - … In terms of making sense of later data - what happens with other
   scroll updates? We don’t currently look into that, but it may be
   interesting to developers. If we’d expose it, it’d need to follow a similar
   shape of what we ship here. It’d need to fit the mold of event timing
   - *Nic*: You had 3 challenges, one of them was around measuring async
   work. Any of the work here would help with that?
   - *nicolás*: We think it’d be hard to come up with heuristics that
   measure the work we want to measure. There’s work posted from the event
   handler, using setTimeout, etc. We’re interested in exploring the problem,
   but haven’t made progress there
   - *Yoav*: For the scroll timing API, it sounds like the feedback was for
   a separate Scroll Timing API
   - *nicolás*: I would like to hear feedback from any other vendor or
   implementor
   - *Noam*: InteractionID could help capture and correlate between scroll
   events and handlers
   - *Yoav*: You could do that with a passive scroll event that gives you a
   target on which the scroll happens
   - *Noam*: Right now we can use target or event timestamp, but today for
   scroll we don't have any options

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=225733
<https://www.google.com/url?q=https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id%3D225733&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1623838462565000&usg=AOvVaw1ejp-dH7C7iyLSy-Oiwchy>
spec
clarification

   - *Nic*: an issue with webkit specifically around TLS connection reuse
   and the connectionStart being 0 in that case. This case needs to be
   clarified that secureConnectionStart needs to be equal to fetchStart only
   in the HTTPS case. So we’re returning 0 in a reused connection that has
   TLS, but it’s fetchStart without TLS.
   - *Yoav*: Current definition is in Fetch, and is doing something else
   than what implementations are doing
   - *nicolás*: should we change the spec or change the implementation?
   - *Alex*: just aligned to the current behavior, so prefer to fix the spec
   - *Yoav*: current behavior gives us info on whether a secure connection
   was used
   - *Nic*: Can take an action time to file an issue
   - *nicolás*: when did we get 58 open issues on RT?

https://github.com/whatwg/fetch/issues/1215
<https://www.google.com/url?q=https://github.com/whatwg/fetch/issues/1215&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1623838462567000&usg=AOvVaw2bTMsfuWHfs_2PbLjjcxii>


   - *Yoav*: ideal answer: none?
   - *Nic*: There’s a middleground answer of exposing them as if they are
   cross origin resources with no TAO
   - *Alex*: Remember needing to add all HTTP status code to this, and now
   there are more errors. There’s a lot that can go wrong: DNS, TLS,  certs.
   Do you want to allow visibility into this?
   - *Nic*: Today we have visibility into DNS, TCP and TLS errors
   - *Yoav*: what about overlap with NEL? Would NEL be sufficient?
   - *Nic*: NEL is hard to tie back to the original session. Would be
   preferable from an analytics perspective to have them be part of RUM,
   rather than a scrubbed report later
   - *Yoav*: Over time, let’s continue the discussion on the issue and on
   the next call in a couple of weeks

<https://docs.google.com/>–

On Wed, May 26, 2021 at 8:58 PM Yoav Weiss <yoavweiss@google.com> wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> Let's meet up <https://meet.google.com/agz-fbji-spp> tomorrow to talk
> about WebPerf! On the agenda
> <https://docs.google.com/document/d/10dz_7QM5XCNsGeI63R864lF9gFqlqQD37B4q8Q46LMM/edit?pli=1#heading=h.q9kp294dpzf8>
> we have EventTiming, as well as a bunch of Resource Timing issues to
> discuss.
>
> The presentation portion of the meeting will be recorded and posted
> online. Due to objections, the discussion will not be recorded.
>
> See y'all tomorrow! :)
> Yoav
>

Received on Wednesday, 16 June 2021 09:27:31 UTC