Comparing In-Browser Methods of Measuring Resource Load Times
Venue
W3C Workshop on Web Performance 8, W3C, W3C/MIT 32 Vassar Street Room 32-G515 Cambridge, MA 02139 USA (2012)
Publication Year
2012
Authors
Eric Gavaletz, Dominic Hamon, Jasleen Kaur
BibTeX
Abstract
When looking for an excellent platform for conducting end-to-end network
performance measurement that is large-scale and representative, researchers should
look no further than the browser -- after all, browsers are installed everywhere
and are used multiple times per day by most Internet users. In this work, we
investigate the use of the DOM, XHR and Navigation Timing API for measuring HTTP
response times within browsers, with the goal of estimating path latency and
throughput. The response times are measured using a set of popular browsers in a
controlled environmentthis helps us isolate the differences between the browsers
as well as study how closely the measurements match the ground truth. We show that,
in general, the XHR method yields the most consistent measurements across browsers,
but that the new Navigation Timing and the proposed Resource Timing APIs could
change that. We also use the measurements from our controlled environment to study
the impact of each of our investigated measurement methods on a hypothetical
measurement study.
