Mike Petrovich
Going beyond Onload: Measuring performance that matters
Velocity 2013 Speaker Series: Focus on Web Apps, Not Web Pages
We’re not making web pages anymore; we’re building web applications. Gone are the days of a few script tags in the <head>. Apps today are a complex web of asynchronously-loaded content and functionality. In the past decade, we’ve progressed from statically-loaded HTML to AJAX-ifying all the things. However, the way we’ve been measuring real user performance of our apps hasn’t changed to reflect our new state of art.
Defining “Done”
At what point during page load do users consider an app to be “ready enough” to start using? If we use standard performance metrics, we have to choose one of the following:
1) When the HTML document has been completely loaded and parsed, but before stylesheets, images, and subframes have finished loading (DOMContentLoaded)
2) When all synchronous scripts, stylesheets, images, and subframes have finished loading (onload)
If we pick DOMContentLoaded, it quickly becomes clear that there’s no inherent correlation between the app state at that point and what a user would consider “ready.”