Re: [WebTiming] HTMLElement timing

I¹d like to jump in here and address this point:

³While I agree that timing information is important, I don't think it's
going to be so commonly used that we need to add convenience features
for it. Adding a few event listeners at the top of the document does
not seem like a big burden.²

I work for a company that sells a web performance monitoring service to
Fortune 1000 companies. To give a quick bit of background to the monitoring
space, there are two basic ways to provide website owners with reliable
performance metrics for their web site/applications. The first is to do
active/synthetic monitoring, where you test the site using an automated
browser from various locations around the world, simulating a real user. The
second approach is called passive or real user monitoring, which captures
actual visits to your site and records the performance of those users. This
second approach is accomplished with either a network tap appliance sitting
in the customers datacenter that captures all of the traffic that comes to
the site, or using the ³event listener² javascript trick which times the
client side page performance and sends it back to a central server.

Each of these approaches has pros and cons. The synthetic approach doesn¹t
tell you what actual users are seeing, but it consistent and easy to
setup/manage. The appliance approach is expensive and misses out on
components that don¹t get served out of the one datacenter, but it sees real
users performance. The client side javascript timing approach gives you very
limited visibility, but is easy to setup and universally available. This
limited nature of the this latter javascript approach is the crux of why
this ³Web Timing² draft is so valuable. Website owners today have no way to
accurately track the true performance of actual visitors to their website.
With the proposed interface additions, companies would finally be able to
not only see how long the page truly takes to load (including the
pre-javascript execution time), but they¹d also now be able to know how much
DNS and connect time affect actual visitors¹ performance, how much of an
impact each image/objects makes (an increasing source of performance
issues), and ideally how much JS parsing and SSL handshakes add to the load
time. This would give website owners tremendously valuable data is currently
impossible to reliably track.

--
Lenny Rachitsky 
Neustar, Inc. / Software Architect/R&D
9444 Waples St., San Diego CA 92121
Office: +1.877.524.8299x434  / lenny.rachitsky@webmetrics.com /
www.neustar.biz    

On 2/2/10 10:36 AM, "Zhiheng Wang" <zhihengw@google.com> wrote:

> Hi, Olli,
> 
> On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 6:15 AM, Olli Pettay <Olli.Pettay@helsinki.fi> wrote:
>> On 1/27/10 9:39 AM, Zhiheng Wang wrote:
>>> Folks,
>>> 
>>>      Thanks to the much feedback from various developers, the WebTiming
>>> specs has undergone some
>>> major revision. Timing info has now been extended to page elements and a
>>> couple more interesting timing
>>> data points are added. The draft is up on
>>> http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/WebTiming/
>>> 
>>>      Feedback and comments are highly appreciated.
>>> 
>>> cheers,
>>> Zhiheng
>> 
>> 
>> Like Jonas mentioned, this kind of information could be exposed
>> using progress events.
>> 
>> What is missing in the draft, and actually in the emails I've seen
>> about this is the actual use case for the web.
>> Debugging web apps can happen outside the web, like Firebug, which
>> investigates what browser does in different times.
>> Why would a web app itself need all this information? To optimize
>> something, like using different server if some server is slow?
>> But for that (extended) progress events would be
>> good.
>> And if the browser exposes all the information that the draft suggest, it
>> would make sense to dispatch some event when some
>> new information is available.
>  
>    Good point and I do need to spend more time on the intro and use cases
> throughout
> the specs. In short, the target of this specs are web site owners who want to
> benchmark their
> user exprience in the field. Debugging tools are indeed very powerful in
> development but things
>  could become quite different once the page is put to the wild, e.g., there is
> no telling
> about dns, tcp connection time in the dev space; UGC only adds more
> complications to the
> overall latency of the page; and, "what is the right TTL for my dns record if
> I want to maintain
> certain cache hit rate?", etc.
> 
>> 
>> There are also undefined things like paint event, which is
>> referred to in lastPaintEvent and paintEventCount.
>> And again, use case for paintEventCount etc.
>  
>    Something like Mozilla's MozAfterPaint?  I do need to work on more use
> cases.
>  
>> 
>> The name of the attribute is very strange:
>> "readonly attribute DOMTiming document;"
>  
>    agreed... how about something like "root_times"? 
>  
>> 
>> 
>> What is the reason for timing array in window object? Why do we need to know
>> anything about previous pages? Or what is the timing attribute about?
>  
>   Something got missing in this revision, my bad. The intention is to keep
> previous pages' timing info only if these pages
> are all in a direction chain. From the user's perspective, the waiting begins
> with the fetching of the first page in a
> redirection chain. 
>  
>  
> thanks,
> Zhiheng
>  
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -Olli
> 
>