Copyright © 2015 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio, Beihang). W3C liability, trademark and document use rules apply.
This specification defines an interface for web applications to access the complete timing information for resources in a document.
This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at http://www.w3.org/TR/.
This is a work in progress and may change without any notices.
Please send comments to public-web-perf@w3.org (archived) with [ResourceTiming] at the start of the subject line.
Implementers SHOULD be aware that this document is not stable. Implementers who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways. Vendors interested in implementing this document before it eventually reaches the Candidate Recommendation stage SHOULD join the aforementioned mailing lists and take part in the discussions.
This document was published by the Web Performance Working Group as a Working Draft. This document is intended to become a W3C Recommendation. If you wish to make comments regarding this document, please send them to public-web-perf@w3.org (subscribe, archives). All comments are welcome.
Publication as a Working Draft does not imply endorsement by the W3C Membership. This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress.
This document was produced by a group operating under the 5 February 2004 W3C Patent Policy. W3C maintains a public list of any patent disclosures made in connection with the deliverables of the group; that page also includes instructions for disclosing a patent. An individual who has actual knowledge of a patent which the individual believes contains Essential Claim(s) must disclose the information in accordance with section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy.
This document is governed by the 1 September 2015 W3C Process Document.
This section is non-normative.
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. While Navigation Timing 2 [NAVIGATION-TIMING-2] addresses
part of the problem by providing timing information associated with a
navigation, this document introduces the PerformanceResourceTiming
interface to allow JavaScript mechanisms to collect complete timing
information related to resources on a document.
For example, the following JavaScript shows a simple attempt to measure the time it takes to fetch a resource:
<!doctype html> <html> <head> </head> <body onload="loadResources()"> <script> function loadResources() { var start = new Date().getTime(); var image1 = new Image(); var resourceTiming = function() { var now = new Date().getTime(); var latency = now - start; alert("End to end resource fetch: " + latency); }; image1.onload = resourceTiming; image1.src = 'http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_main.png'; } </script> <img src="http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_home.png"> </body> </html>
Though this script can measure the time it takes to fetch a resource, it cannot break down the time spent in various phases. Further, the script cannot easily measure the time it takes to fetch resources described in markup.
To address the need for complete information on user experience, this document
introduces the PerformanceResourceTiming
interface.
This interface allows JavaScript mechanisms to provide complete client-side latency measurements within applications.
With this interface, the previous example can be modified to measure a user's
perceived load time of a resource.
The following script calculates the amount of time it takes to fetch every resource in the
page, even those defined in markup. This example assumes
that this page is hosted on http://www.w3.org.
One could further measure the amount of time it takes in every phase of fetching a resource
with the PerformanceResourceTiming
interface.
<!doctype html> <html> <head> </head> <body onload="loadResources()"> <script> function loadResources() { var image1 = new Image(); image1.onload = resourceTiming; image1.src = 'http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_main.png'; } function resourceTiming() { var resourceList = window.performance.getEntriesByType("resource"); for (i = 0; i < resourceList.length; i++) { if (resourceList[i].initiatorType == "img") { alert("End to end resource fetch: "+ resourceList[i].responseEnd - resourceList[i].startTime); } } } </script> <img id="image0" src="http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_home.png"> </body> </html>
As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines, diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative.
The key words MAY, MUST, MUST NOT, SHOULD, and SHOULD NOT are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
Requirements phrased in the imperative as part of algorithms (such as "strip any leading space characters" or "return false and abort these steps") are to be interpreted with the meaning of the key word ("MUST", "SHOULD", "MAY", etc) used in introducing the algorithm.
Some conformance requirements are phrased as requirements on attributes, methods or objects. Such requirements are to be interpreted as requirements on user agents.
Conformance requirements phrased as algorithms or specific steps may be implemented in any manner, so long as the end result is equivalent. (In particular, the algorithms defined in this specification are intended to be easy to follow, and not intended to be performant.)
The IDL fragments in this specification must be interpreted as required for conforming IDL fragments, as described in the Web IDL specification. [WebIDL]
The construction "a Foo
object", where Foo
is actually an interface, is sometimes used instead of
the more accurate "an object implementing the interface Foo
".
The term DOM is used to refer to the API set made available to scripts in
Web applications, and does not necessarily imply the existence of an actual
Document
object or of any other Node
objects as
defined in the DOM specification. [DOM]
A DOM attribute is said to be getting when its value is being retrieved (such as by author script), and is said to be setting when a new value is assigned to it.
The term JavaScript is used to refer to ECMA262, rather than the official term ECMAScript, since the term JavaScript is more widely known. [ECMA-262]
The term resource is used to refer to elements and any other user-initiated fetches throughout this specification. For example, a resource could originate from XMLHttpRequest objects [[XMLHttpRequest], HTML elements [HTML5] such as iframe, img, script, object, embed, and link with the link type of stylesheet, and SVG elements [SVG11] such as svg.
The term cross-origin is used to mean non same origin.
The term current document refers to the document associated with the Window object's newest Document object.
Throughout this work, all time values are measured in milliseconds since the start of navigation of the document [HR-TIME-2]. For example, the start of navigation of the document occurs at time 0.
The term current time refers to the number of milliseconds since the start of navigation of the document until the current moment in time.
This definition of time is based on the High Resolution Time specification [HR-TIME-2] and is different from the definition of time used in the Navigation Timing specification [NAVIGATION-TIMING], where time is measured in milliseconds since midnight of January 1, 1970 (UTC).
This section is non-normative.
The PerformanceResourceTiming
interface facilitates timing measurement of downloadable resources. For example, this interface is available for
XMLHttpRequest objects [XMLHttpRequest], HTML
elements [HTML5] such as
iframe,
img,
script,
object,
embed,
and link
with the link type of
stylesheet,
and SVG elements [SVG11] such
as svg.
PerformanceResourceTiming
InterfaceAll resources fetched by the current browsing [HTML5] or worker [WORKERS] context's MUST be included as PerformanceResourceTiming
objects in the Performance Timeline of the relevant context. Resources that are retrieved from relevant application caches or local resources MUST be included as PerformanceResourceTiming
objects in the Performance Timeline ([PERFORMANCE-TIMELINE-2]). Resources for which the fetch was initiated, but was later aborted (e.g. due to a network error) MUST be included as PerformanceResourceTiming
objects in the Performance Timeline and MUST contain initialized attribute values for processed substeps of the processing model.
The rest of this section is non-normative.
Examples:
src
attribute of two HTML IMG
elements,
the fetch of the resource initiated by the first HTML IMG
element SHOULD
be included as a PerformanceResourceTiming
object in the Performance Timeline.
The user agent might not re-request the URL for the second HTML IMG
element, instead using the existing download it initiated for the first HTML IMG
element.
In this case, the fetch of the resource by the first
IMG
element would be the only occurrence in the Performance Timeline.
src
attribute of a HTML IMG
element is changed via script, both the fetch of the original resource as well
as the fetch of the new URL would be included as PerformanceResourceTiming
objects in
the Performance Timeline.
IFRAME
element is added via markup without specifying a src
attribute, the user agent may load the about:blank
document for the IFRAME
. If at a later time the src
attribute is changed dynamically via script, the user agent may
fetch the new URL resource for the IFRAME
. In this case, only the
fetch of the new URL would be included
as a PerformanceResourceTiming
object in the Performance Timeline.
XMLHttpRequest
is generated twice for the same canonical URL, both fetches of the resource would be
included as a PerformanceResourceTiming
object in the Performance Timeline.
This is because the fetch of the resource for the second XMLHttpRequest
cannot reuse the download issued for the first XMLHttpRequest
.
IFRAME
element is included on the page, then only the resource requested by IFRAME
src
attribute is included
as a PerformanceResourceTiming
object in the Performance Timeline.
Sub-resources requested by the IFRAME
document will be included in the IFRAME
document's Performance Timeline and not the parent
document's Performance Timeline.
IMG
element has a data: URI
as its source [RFC2397], then this resource will not
be included as a PerformanceResourceTiming
object in the Performance Timeline.
By definition data: URI
contains embedded data and does not require a fetch.
PerformanceResourceTiming
object in the Performance Timeline with initialized attribute values up to the point of failure - e.g. a TCP handshake error should report DNS timestamps for the request, and so on.
PerformanceResourceTiming
object in the Performance Timeline.
The user agent MAY choose to limit how many resources are included as
PerformanceResourceTiming
objects in the Performance Timeline.
The recommended minimum number of PerformanceResourceTiming
objects is 150, though this may be changed by the user agent.
setResourceTimingBufferSize
can be called to request a change to this limit.
PerformanceResourceTiming
Interface
The PerformanceResourceTiming
interface participates in the
Performance Timeline and extends the following attributes of the
PerformanceEntry interface:
name
entryType
entryType
attribute MUST return the DOMString "resource
".startTime
startTime
attribute MUST return a DOMHighResTimeStamp [HR-TIME-2]
with the time immediately before the user agent starts to queue the resource for fetching.
If there are HTTP redirects or equivalent
when fetching the resource, and if all the redirects or equivalent are from the same origin as the current
document or the timing allow check algorithm passes, this attribute MUST return the same value as redirectStart.
Otherwise, this attribute MUST return the same value as fetchStart.duration
duration
attribute MUST return a DOMHighResTimeStamp
equal to the difference between responseEnd and startTime, respectively.[Exposed=(Window,Worker)]
interface PerformanceResourceTiming : PerformanceEntry {
readonly attribute DOMString initiatorType;
readonly attribute DOMString nextHopProtocol;
readonly attribute DOMHighResTimeStamp workerStart;
readonly attribute DOMHighResTimeStamp redirectStart;
readonly attribute DOMHighResTimeStamp redirectEnd;
readonly attribute DOMHighResTimeStamp fetchStart;
readonly attribute DOMHighResTimeStamp domainLookupStart;
readonly attribute DOMHighResTimeStamp domainLookupEnd;
readonly attribute DOMHighResTimeStamp connectStart;
readonly attribute DOMHighResTimeStamp connectEnd;
readonly attribute DOMHighResTimeStamp secureConnectionStart;
readonly attribute DOMHighResTimeStamp requestStart;
readonly attribute DOMHighResTimeStamp responseStart;
readonly attribute DOMHighResTimeStamp responseEnd;
readonly attribute unsigned long long transferSize;
readonly attribute unsigned long long encodedBodySize;
readonly attribute unsigned long long decodedBodySize;
serializer = {inherit, attribute};
};
connectEnd
of type DOMHighResTimeStamp, readonly This attribute MUST return the time immediately after the user agent finishes establishing the connection to the server to retrieve the resource. If a persistent connection [RFC7230] is used or the resource is retrieved from relevant application caches or local resources, this attribute MUST return the value of domainLookupEnd.
If the transport connection fails and the user agent reopens a connection, connectStart and connectEnd SHOULD return the corresponding values of the new connection.
connectEnd MUST include the time interval to establish the transport connection, as well as other time intervals such as SSL handshake and SOCKS authentication.
If the last non-redirected fetch of the resource is not the same origin as the current document, connectEnd MUST return zero unless the timing allow check algorithm passes.
connectStart
of type DOMHighResTimeStamp, readonly This attribute MUST return the time immediately before the user agent start establishing the connection to the server to retrieve the resource. If a persistent connection [RFC7230] is used or the resource is retrieved from relevant application caches or local resources, this attribute MUST return value of domainLookupEnd.
If the last non-redirected fetch of the resource is not the same origin as the current document, connectStart MUST return zero unless timing allow check algorithm passes.
decodedBodySize
of type unsigned long long, readonly This attribute MUST return the size, in octets received from a HTTP-network-or-cache fetch, of the message body [RFC7230], after removing any applied content-codings [RFC7231]:
domainLookupEnd
of type DOMHighResTimeStamp, readonly This attribute MUST return the time immediately after the user agent finishes the domain name lookup for the resource. If a persistent connection [RFC7230] is used or the resource is retrieved from relevant application caches or local resources, this attribute MUST return the same value as fetchStart.
If the user agent has the domain information in cache, domainLookupStart and domainLookupEnd represent the times when the user agent starts and ends the domain data retrieval from the cache.
If the last non-redirected fetch of the resource is not the same origin as the current document, domainLookupEnd MUST return zero unless the timing allow check algorithm passes.
domainLookupStart
of type DOMHighResTimeStamp, readonly This attribute MUST return the time immediately before the user agent starts the domain name lookup for the resource. If a persistent connection [RFC7230] is used or the resource is retrieved from relevant application caches or local resources, this attribute MUST return the same value as fetchStart.
If the last non-redirected fetch of the resource is not the same origin as the current document, domainLookupStart MUST return zero unless the timing allow check algorithm passes.
encodedBodySize
of type unsigned long long, readonly This attribute MUST return the size, in octets received from a HTTP-network-or-cache fetch, of the payload body [RFC7230], prior to removing any applied content-codings [RFC7231]:
The encodedBodySize
may be zero depending on the response code - e.g. HTTP 204 (No Content), 3XX, etc.
fetchStart
of type DOMHighResTimeStamp, readonly If there are no HTTP redirects or equivalent, this attribute MUST return the time immediately before the user agent starts to fetch the resource.
If there are HTTP redirects or equivalent, this attribute MUST return the time immediately before the user agent starts to fetch the final resource in the redirection.
initiatorType
of type DOMString, readonly If the initiator is an element
, on getting, the initiatorType
attribute MUST return a DOMString with the same value as the localName
of that
element
[DOM].
If the initiator is a CSS resource downloaded by the url()
syntax [CSS-SYNTAX-3], such as @import url()
or background: url()
,
on getting, the initiatorType
attribute MUST return the DOMString "css"
.
If the initiator is an XMLHttpRequest object [XMLHttpRequest], on getting, the initiatorType
attribute MUST return the DOMString "xmlhttprequest"
.
nextHopProtocol
of type DOMString, readonly This attribute MUST return the network protocol used to fetch the resource, as identified by the ALPN Protocol ID [RFC7301]. When a proxy is configured, if a tunnel connection is established then this attribute MUST return the ALPN Protocol ID of the tunneled protocol, otherwise it MUST return the ALPN Protocol ID of the first hop to the proxy.
In order to have precisely one way to represent any ALPN protocol ID, the following additional constraints apply: octets in the ALPN protocol MUST NOT be percent-encoded if they are valid token characters except "%", and when using percent-encoding, uppercase hex digits MUST be used.
Note that this attribute is intended to identify the network protocol in use for the fetch regardless of how it was actually negotiated; that is, even if ALPN is not used to negotiate the network protocol, this attribute still uses the ALPN Protocol ID's to indicate the protocol in use.
redirectEnd
of type DOMHighResTimeStamp, readonly If there are HTTP redirects or equivalent when fetching the resource and if all the redirects or equivalent are from the same origin as the current document, this attribute MUST return the time immediately after receiving the last byte of the response of the last redirect.
If there are HTTP redirects or equivalent when fetching the resource and if any of the redirects are not from the same origin as the current document, but the timing allow check algorithm passes for each redirected resource, this attribute MUST return the time immediately after receiving the last byte of the response of the last redirect. Otherwise, this attribute MUST return zero.
redirectStart
of type DOMHighResTimeStamp, readonly If there are HTTP redirects or equivalent when fetching the resource and if all the redirects or equivalent are from the same origin as the current document, this attribute MUST return the starting time of the fetch that initiates the redirect.
If there are HTTP redirects or equivalent when fetching the resource and if any of the redirects are not from the same origin as the current document, but the timing allow check algorithm passes for each redirected resource, this attribute MUST return the starting time of the fetch that initiates the redirect. Otherwise, this attribute MUST return zero.
requestStart
of type DOMHighResTimeStamp, readonly This attribute MUST return the time immediately before the user agent starts requesting the resource from the server, or from relevant application caches or from local resources.
If the transport connection fails after a request is sent and the user agent reopens a connection and resend the request, requestStart MUST return the corresponding values of the new request.
If the last non-redirected fetch of the resource is not the same origin as the current document, requestStart MUST return zero unless the timing allow check algorithm passes.
This interface does not include an attribute to represent the completion of sending the request, e.g., requestEnd.
responseEnd
of type DOMHighResTimeStamp, readonly This attribute MUST return the time immediately after the user agent receives the last byte of the resource or immediately before the transport connection is closed, whichever comes first. The resource here can be received either from the server, relevant application caches or from local resources.
responseStart
of type DOMHighResTimeStamp, readonly This attribute MUST return the time immediately after the user agent receives the first byte of the response from the server, or from relevant application caches or from local resources.
If the last non-redirected fetch of the resource is not the same origin as the current document, responseStart MUST return zero unless the timing allow check algorithm passes.
secureConnectionStart
of type DOMHighResTimeStamp, readonly When a secure transport is used, this attribute MUST return the time immediately before the user agent starts the handshake process to secure the current connection. If a secure transport is not used, this attribute MUST return zero. If a persistent connection [RFC7230] is used or the resource is retrieved from relevant application caches or local resources, this attribute MUST return value of domainLookupEnd.
If the last non-redirected fetch of the resource is not the same origin as the current document, secureConnectionStart MUST return zero unless the timing allow check algorithm passes.
transferSize
of type unsigned long long, readonly This attribute MUST return the size, in octets received from a HTTP-network fetch, consumed by the response header fields and the response payload body [RFC7230]:
This attribute SHOULD include HTTP overhead (such as HTTP/1.1 chunked encoding and whitespace around header fields, including newlines, and HTTP/2 frame overhead, along with other server-to-client frames on the same stream), but SHOULD NOT include lower-layer protocol overhead (such as TLS or TCP).
It is possible for transferSize
value to be lower than encodedBodySize
: when a cached response is successfully revalidated the transferSize
reports the size of the response HTTP headers incurred during the revalidation, and encodedBodySize
reports the size of the previously retrieved payload body.
workerStart
of type DOMHighResTimeStamp, readonly Instances of this interface are serialized as a map with entries from the closest inherited interface and with entries for each of the serializable attributes.
Performance
Interfacepartial interface Performance {
void clearResourceTimings
();
void setResourceTimingBufferSize
(unsigned long maxSize);
attribute EventHandler onresourcetimingbufferfull
;
};
The method clearResourceTimings
clears the buffer used to store the current
list of PerformanceResourceTiming
resources.
The setResourceTimingBufferSize
method, when invoked, MUST set the maximum number of PerformanceResourceTiming
resources that may be stored in
the buffer to the value of the maxSize
parameter. The buffer is considered to be full if the number of entries in it is greater than or equal to maxSize
.
If this method is not called, the user agent SHOULD store at least 150 PerformanceResourceTiming
resources in the buffer, unless otherwise specified by the user agent.
If the maxSize
parameter is less than the number of elements currently stored in the buffer, no elements in the buffer are to be removed and the user agent MUST NOT fire the resourcetimingbufferfull
event.
The attribute onresourcetimingbufferfull
is the event handler for the resourcetimingbufferfull
event. Immediately after the buffer used to store the list of PerformanceResourceTiming
resources becomes full, the User Agent MUST fire a simple event named resourcetimingbufferfull
that bubbles, isn't cancelable, has no default action, at the
Performance
object.
Cross-origin resources MUST be included as PerformanceResourceTiming
objects in the Performance Timeline.
If the timing allow check algorithm fails for a cross-origin resource, these attributes of its PerformanceResourceTiming
object
MUST be set to zero: redirectStart, redirectEnd,
domainLookupStart, domainLookupEnd, connectStart,
connectEnd, requestStart, responseStart
and secureConnectionStart.
Server-side applications may return the Timing-Allow-Origin
HTTP response header
to allow the User Agent to fully expose, to the document origin(s) specified, the
values of attributes that would have been zero due to the cross-origin
restrictions previously specified in this section.
Timing-Allow-Origin
Response HeaderTiming-Allow-Origin
The header indicates whether a resource's timing can be shared based by returning the value of the Origin request header in the response.
ABNF:
Timing-Allow-Origin = "Timing-Allow-Origin" ":" origin-list-or-null | "*"
The timing allow check algorithm, which checks whether a resource's timing information can be shared with the current document, is as follows:
If the resource is not cross-origin, return pass.
If the HTTP response includes zero or more than one
Timing-Allow-Origin
header values, return fail and terminate this algorithm.
If the
Timing-Allow-Origin
header value is the "*
" character, return pass and terminate this
algorithm.
If the value of
Timing-Allow-Origin
is not a case-sensitive match for the value of the
origin
of the current document, return fail and terminate this algorithm.
Return pass.
The above algorithm also functions when the
ASCII serialization of an origin is
the string "null
". Typically, this is the case when there are multiple redirects and the initiator is an XMLHttpRequest object.
In practice the
origin-list-or-null
production is
more constrained. Rather than allowing a space-separated list of
origins, it is either a
single origin or the string
"null
".
The following graph illustrates the timing attributes defined by the PerformanceResourceTiming interface. Attributes underlined may not be available when fetching resources from different origins. User agents may perform internal processing in between timings, which allow for non-normative intervals between timings.
PerformanceResourceTiming
resources.setResourceTimingBufferSize
method.
no-cors
policy, perform the following steps:
Above cross-origin exclusion should be defined via Fetch registry: CSS needs to be defined in terms of Fetch and set some kind of "opaque request flag" for no-CORS CSS subresources. In turn, Resource Timing should interface with Fetch registry to surface resource fetch events.
PerformanceResourceTiming
object and
set entryType to the DOMString resource
.
When persistent connection [RFC7230] is enabled, a user agent may first try to re-use an open connect to send the request while the connection can be asynchronously closed. In such case, connectStart, connectEnd and requestStart SHOULD represent timing information collected over the re-open connection.
PerformanceResourceTiming
object to 0 except
startTime,
redirectStart,
redirectEnd, and initiatorType.
PerformanceResourceTiming
object.
PerformanceResourceTiming
object to the primary buffer.
If adding it causes the primary buffer to become full, fire the resourcetimingbufferfull
event at the Document.
clearResourceTimings
method is called in the event handler for the resourcetimingbufferfull
event,
clear all PerformanceResourceTiming
objects in the primary buffer.
setResourceTimingBufferSize
method is called in the event handler for the resourcetimingbufferfull
event,
set the maximum size of the primary buffer to the maxSize parameter. If the maxSize parameter is less than the number of elements currently stored in the buffer, no elements in the buffer are to be removed.
The value of the timing attributes MUST monotonically increase to ensure timing attributes are not skewed by adjustments to the system clock while fetching the resource. The difference between any two chronologically recorded timing attributes MUST never be negative. For all resources, including subdocument resources, the user agent MUST record the system clock at the beginning of the root document navigation and define subsequent timing attributes in terms of a monotonic clock measuring time elapsed from the beginning of the navigation.
This section is non-normative.
The PerformanceResourceTiming
interface exposes timing information for a resource to any web page or worker that has requested that resource. To limit the access to the PerformanceResourceTiming
interface, the same origin
policy is enforced by default and certain attributes are set to zero, as described in 4.5 Cross-origin Resources. Resource providers can
explicitly allow all timing information to be collected for a resource by
adding the Timing-Allow-Origin HTTP response header, which specifies the
domains that are allowed to access the timing information.
Statistical fingerprinting is a privacy concern where a malicious web site may determine whether a user has visited a third-party web site by measuring the timing of cache hits and misses of resources in the third-party web site. Though the PerformanceResourceTiming
interface gives timing information for resources in a document, the cross-origin restrictions prevent making this privacy concern any worse than it is today using the load event on resources to measure timing to determine cache hits and misses.
We would like to sincerely thank Karen Anderson, Darin Fisher, Tony Gentilcore, Nic Jansma, Kyle Scholz, Jonas Sicking, James Simonsen, Steve Souders, Annie Sullivan, Sigbjørn Vik, Jason Weber to acknowledge their contributions to this work.