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RAFP: a proposal for performance measurements through requestAnimationFrame

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I would like to propose a way of measuring the current performance of websites in real-world browsers with requestAnimationFrame. The really weird thing is that almost no one seems to have thought of this before.

The approach is very simple and a few tests show it appears to be worthwhile. I mean, it would be seriously cool if we find a reliable method to progressively enhance a site on-the-fly by turning off features if it turns out this specific browser is plagued by bad performance.

The basic idea is very simple: repeat requestAnimationFrame calls during one second, count how many times it’s called, and use the result to draw conclusions on the current performance of your website in your user’s browser. If the FPS (frames per second) rate starts to go down the browser is having more problems with executing your CSS or JavaScript, and it might be advisable to turn off, say, animations, or that one complicated DOM script that rewrites a table all the time.

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This is the blog of Peter-Paul Koch, web developer, consultant, and trainer. You can also follow him on Twitter or Mastodon.
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