Many websites use real user measurement (RUM) data to analyze their performance, as well as to validate the impact of optimizations. During this session, we’ll discuss how RUM is used and then explore some of the fascinating insights into the web that we can learn from it. Video: https://youtu.be/VOyEU9o1wL4

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Real User
Measurement
Insights
Paul Calvano
Principal Web Performance Architect
pacalvan@akamai.com
@paulcalvano

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Synthetic
Real User (RUM)

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What Is Real User Measurement?
● Performance data
collected from real
users accessing
your site
● Uses web timing
APIs to collect stats:
○ Navigation Timing
○ Resource Timing
○ Paint Timing
○ Server Timing

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

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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

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Device Types

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43%
51%
56%
80%
Distribution of mobile traffic by country

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Distribution of mobile traffic by country

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Distribution of tablet traffic by country
8%
15%
1%
3%
10%

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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

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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/

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How mPulse Measures Time to Interactive: https://blogs.akamai.com/2018/04/perception-matters-measure-perceived-
performance.html

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iPhone 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

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Identifying Android Model Numbers

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Android Device Fragmentation: ~ 12,200 devices!

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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.

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Comparing Two Popular Android Phones
Source: https://www.sammobile.com

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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

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Web Browsers

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Browser Distributions

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

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Firefox: 7-10 Days to Reach 70% After Release
Controlled Deployment Details https://wiki.mozilla.org/Balrog
V54 v55 v56 v57 v58 v59 v60 v61 v62
v63
v52
v45

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Chrome: ~3 Weeks to Reach 85% After Release
Controlled Deployment Details - https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkcr/docs/process/release_cycle.md#stable-release
v59 v60 v61 v62 v63 v64 v65 v66 v67 v68 v69
v70
v49

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Chrome 68 Update…
v67
v68

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Chrome 70 Distrusts Legacy Symantec Certificates
v69
v70
https://security.googleblog.com/2018/03/distrust-of-symantec-pki-immediate.html

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Edge Accounts for Almost 40% of Microsoft Browser Traffic
IE7
IE11
Edge 15 Edge 16 Edge 17
Edge 14

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Weekly Fluctuations: Enterprise Users on IE11

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60% of Safari traffic is from version 12
v9
v10 v11 v12

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iOS Safari - v12 is almost 70%
v9
v10 v11 v12

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v9
v10
v11 v12

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20% of Chrome Mobile Users Are One Year Behind Stable
Samsung Browser uses Chromium v59 rendering engine - https://developer.samsung.com/internet
v59 v60 v61 v62 v63 v64 v65 v66 v67 v68 v69
v70
V51 v56 v59

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Additional Insights

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Outages = Sudden Drop of Real Users
https://blogs.oracle.com/internetintelligence/power-failure-leaves-brazilian-internet-in-the-dark

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Performance by US Mobile Network
Based on US Traffic from mPulse, July 2018

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Mobile Networks in GB
Based on % Page Views from mPulse, October 2018

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How’s that InFlight Wifi?

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

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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/

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Analyzing the Long Tail…
Median - 3.7 seconds
75th Percentile - 7.7 seconds
95th Percentile - 27.7 seconds
Loooooooooooooooooong Tail! (3% = 10s of millions of pages)

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Dissecting the Slowest 3% of Page Views in GB

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What Did We Learn?
● Mobile now exceeds desktop, especially during weekends
● Tablet usage varies by Geo, but is consistently slower than desktop and mobile
● 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!

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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

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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

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Q&A
pacalvan@akamai.com
@paulcalvano