1. ©2016 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Real User Measurement Insights
August 9, 2018
Paul Calvano
Principal Web Performance Architect
pacalvan@akamai.com
@paulcalvano

2. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Synthetic
Real User (RUM)

3. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM

4. ©2018 AKAMAI
Implementing RUM without Impacting Performance
Source: https://gist.github.com/bluesmoon/351ea5b2815606863a2de2c4889e8016/
https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2017/an-audit-of-boomerangs-performance/

5. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM

6. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
What’s In An mPulse Beacon?
● Device and Browser Information
● Geographic Information
● Performance Timing Information
● Feature Flags
● Custom Metrics and Timers
Source: https://developer.akamai.com/mpulse/whats-in-a-beacon

7. ©2016 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Device Types

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12. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Source: https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2018/08/07/securing-sites-made-them-less-accessible/
Akamai mPulse data from August 7th, 2018
Median:
US: 3.7 seconds
UG: 7.8 seconds
75th Percentile:
US: 6.5 seconds
UG: 25.4 seconds
95th Percentile:
US: 20 seconds
UG: 98 seconds

13. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM

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Time to Interactive
https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2017/time-to-interactive-measuring-more-of-the-user-experience/
https://developer.akamai.com/blog/2017/04/12/gauge-user-experience-time-interactive/

16. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
How mPulse Measures Time to Interactive: https://blogs.akamai.com/2018/04/perception-matters-measure-perceived-
performance.html

17. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM

18. ©2018 AKAMAI
Device Identification
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 11_4_1 like Mac OS X)
AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/15G77
https://www.paintcodeapp.com/news/ultimate-guide-to-iphone-resolutions

19. ©2018 AKAMAI
iOS: ~15% of Pages Served to Older iPhones

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Analyzing Performance of iPhone Devices

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Identifying Android Model Numbers

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Android Device Fragmentation: ~ 11,500 devices!

23. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Long Tasks Per Android Device
● LongTasks API - implemented in
Chrome browsers:
○ https://www.w3.org/TR/longtasks/
● Whenever a task takes longer than
50ms it is considered a long task.
● mPulse is collecting the total durations
of all long tasks during a page load.

24. ©2018 AKAMAI
Comparing Two Popular Android Phones
Source: https://www.sammobile.com

25. ©2018 AKAMAI
Galaxy J3 is Much Slower Compared to S7

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Popular Devices per Geo
● iPhone: Most Popular
● Samsung Galaxy S8:
○ Most popular Android device
in most but not all countries.
● Other Popular Phones
○ Redmi Note 4 in India and
Russia
○ Huawei in Italy
○ Xperia in Japan
● Device Fragmentation is global
○ Most popular Android
phones account for 2-6% of
traffic

27. ©2016 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Web Browsers

28. ©2018 AKAMAI
Browser Distributions

29. ©2018 AKAMAI
Analyzing Browser Performance - Firefox Quantum
Source: https://developer.akamai.com/blog/2017/11/29/measuring-performance-firefox-quantum-rum/

30. ©2018 AKAMAI
Firefox: 7-10 Days to Reach 70% After Release
Controlled Deployment Details https://wiki.mozilla.org/Balrog

31. ©2018 AKAMAI
Chrome: ~3 Weeks to Reach 80% After Release
Controlled Deployment Details - https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkcr/docs/process/release_cycle.md#stable-release

32. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Chrome 68 Update…
v67
v68

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Edge Accounts for Almost 40% of Microsoft Browser Traffic

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Weekly Fluctuations: Enterprise Users on IE11

35. ©2018 AKAMAI
Safari v11 Reached 40% Before High Sierra Release

36. ©2018 AKAMAI
iOS Safari - 1 Month to Reach 50%

37. ©2018 AKAMAI
20% of Chrome Mobile Users Are One Year Behind Stable
Samsung Browser uses Chromium v59 rendering engine - https://developer.samsung.com/internet

38. ©2016 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Additional Insights

39. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Outages = Sudden Drop of Real Users
https://blogs.oracle.com/internetintelligence/power-failure-leaves-brazilian-internet-in-the-dark

40. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Performance by Mobile Network
Based on US Traffic from mPulse, July 2018

41. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
How’s that InFlight Wifi?

42. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Performance by Battery Level
Source: https://developer.akamai.com/blog/2018/05/29/does-androids-battery-saver-degrade-the-mobile-web-experience/

43. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Long Task Time Impacted by Battery Level
Source: https://developer.akamai.com/blog/2018/05/29/does-androids-battery-saver-degrade-the-mobile-web-experience/

44. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Analyzing the Long Tail…
Median - 3.7 seconds
75th Percentile - 7.5 seconds
95th Percentile - 25.1 seconds
Loooooooooooooooooong Tail! (5% = 100s of millions of pages)

45. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Dissecting the Slowest 5% of Page Views - Aug 8, 2018

46. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Dissecting the Slowest 5% of Page Views - Aug 8, 2018
70% under
500ms
72% under
700ms
85% under
1000ms
85% under
4800ms 90% OVER
24700ms

47. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
What Did We Learn?
● Mobile Now Exceeds Desktop During Weekends
● Tablet usage varys by Geo, but is consistently slower than Desktop and Mobile
● iPhone models have a measurable performance delta, and 15% are older devices
● Android Device Fragmentation continues to be a very large performance problem
● Most browsers are carefully deployed to users in a multi-stage process
● Safari, Edge and IE browsers are closely aligned to OS Upgrades
● The performance impact of new browser features are limited by end-user upgrades
● Battery life may impact your performance
● Analyze the long tail of your performance and you may be surprised what you find!

48. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
mPulse Lite = Free RUM
Akamai Customers - Sign up via the Akamai MarketPlace
Not Using Akamai? - Sign up for free at http://www.akamai.com/trympulse

49. ©2018 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Akamai - State of the Internet Reboot!
● Akamai State of the Internet Report
originally published between 2008 - 2017
● Currently on hiatus, but coming back
soon!
● Will include mPulse stats and trends
● We’re open to suggestions on what you
would like to see included!
○ stateoftheinternet@akamai.com
○ pacalvan@akamai.com

50. ©2016 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Q&A
Paul Calvano
Principal Web Performance Architect
pacalvan@akamai.com
@paulcalvano