Watir-Webdriver-Performance gem released

Today I added a simple watir-webdriver-performance gem whose purpose is to collect performance metrics specified for web applications to access timing information related to navigation and elements.

User latency is an important quality benchmark for Web Applications. While JavaScript-based mechanisms can provide comprehensive instrumentation for user latency measurements within an application, in many cases, they are unable to provide a complete end-to-end latency picture.

To address the need for complete information on user experience, this document introduces the PerformanceTiming interfaces. This interface allows JavaScript mechanisms to provide complete client-side latency measurements within applications. With the proposed interface, the previous example can be modified to measure a user’s perceived page load time.

You can read more about the PerformanceTiming specification here. Essentially this gem collects all available metrics from the browser and summarises them in a format similar to the following diagram:

To use this gem simply install:

 gem install watir-webdriver-performance

And use the browser.performance helper method to access the metrics.

>> require 'watir-webdriver'
>> require 'watir-webdriver-performance'
>> b = Watir::Browser.new :chrome
>> b.goto "watirgrid.com"
=> "https://github.com/90kts/watirgrid"
>> # End user response time was
?> b.performance.summary[:response_time]/1000
=> 8
>> #seconds ...
?> # Time to first byte i.e. "server time" was
?> b.performance.summary[:time_to_first_byte]
=> 3341
>> #milliseconds ...
?> # Summary timings available
{
    :summary => {
                   :redirect=>0,
                  :app_cache=>0,
                        :dns=>0,
            :tcp_connection=>982,
     :tcp_connection_secure=>721,
                  :request=>1222,
                    :response=>4,
           :dom_processing=>4293,
            :response_time=>7298,
       :time_to_first_byte=>2205,
        :time_to_last_byte=>2209
    },
    :navigation => {
                     :type => 0,
        :type_back_forward => 2,
           :redirect_count => 0,
            :type_reserved => 255,
            :type_navigate => 0,
              :type_reload => 1
    },
        :memory => {
        :total_js_heap_size => 0,
        :js_heap_size_limit => 0,
         :used_js_heap_size => 0
    },
        :timing => {
                   :domain_lookup_start => 1303180421599,
                        :load_event_end => 0,
                           :connect_end => 1303180421642,
                          :response_end => 1303180421853,
                           :dom_loading => 1303180421840,
                      :navigation_start => 0,
                          :redirect_end => 0,
                    :unload_event_start => 0,
               :secure_connection_start => 0,
                         :connect_start => 1303180421600,
          :dom_content_loaded_event_end => 1303180421934,
                     :domain_lookup_end => 1303180421600,
                       :dom_interactive => 1303180421934,
                      :load_event_start => 0,
                         :request_start => 1303180421642,
                        :response_start => 1303180421838,
                          :dom_complete => 0,
                           :fetch_start => 1303180421598,
        :dom_content_loaded_event_start => 1303180421934,
                        :redirect_start => 0,
                      :unload_event_end => 0
    }
  }