Server Timing (original) (raw)

Abstract

This specification enables a server to communicate performance metrics about the request-response cycle to the user agent. It also standardizes a JavaScript interface to enable applications to collect, process, and act on these metrics to optimize application delivery.

Status of This Document

This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at https://www.w3.org/TR/.

This document was published by the Web Performance Working Group as a Working Draft using theRecommendation track.

Publication as a Working Draft does not imply endorsement by W3C and its Members.

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 theW3C Patent Policy.W3C maintains apublic 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 containsEssential Claim(s) must disclose the information in accordance withsection 6 of the W3C Patent Policy.

This document is governed by the2 November 2021 W3C Process Document.

Abstract
Status of This Document
1. Introduction
2. Conformance
3. The Server-Timing Header Field
4. The PerformanceServerTiming Interface
5. Extension to the PerformanceResourceTiming interface
1. 5.1 serverTiming attribute
6. Privacy and Security
7. IANA Considerations
1. 7.1 Server-Timing Header Field
A. Examples
B. Use cases
B.1 Server timing in developer tools
B.2 Server timing for automated analytics
B.3 Measuring request routing performance
C. Acknowledgments
D. References
D.1 Normative references
D.2 Informative references

This section is non-normative.

Accurately measuring performance characteristics of web applications is an important aspect of making web applications faster. [NAVIGATION-TIMING] and [RESOURCE-TIMING] provide detailed request timing information for the document and its resources, which include time when the request was initiated, and various milestones to negotiate the connection and receive the response. However, while the user agent can observe the timing data of the request it has no insight into how or why certain stages of the request-response cycle have taken as much time as they have - e.g., how the request was routed, where the time was spent on the server, and so on.

This specification introduces PerformanceServerTiming interface, which enables the server to communicate performance metrics about the request-response cycle to the user agent, and a JavaScript interface to enable applications to collect, process, and act on these metrics to optimize application delivery.

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, and SHOULD NOT in this document are to be interpreted as described inBCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.

[Exposed=(Window,Worker)]
interface PerformanceServerTiming {
  readonly attribute DOMString name;
  readonly attribute DOMHighResTimeStamp duration;
  readonly attribute DOMString description;
  [Default] object toJSON();
};

When toJSON is called, run [WEBIDL]'s default toJSON steps.

The name getter steps are to return this's metric name.

The duration getter steps are to do the following:

If this's params["dur"] does not exist, return 0.
Let dur be the result of parsing this's params["dur"] using the rules for parsing floating-point number values.
If dur is an error, return 0; Otherwise return dur.

Note

Since duration is a DOMHighResTimeStamp, it usually represents a duration in milliseconds. Since this is not enforcable in practice, duration can represent any unit of time, and having it represent a duration in milliseconds is a recommendation.

The description getter steps are to return this's params["desc"] if it exists, otherwise the empty string.

A PerformanceServerTiming has an associated string metric name, initially set to the empty string.

A PerformanceServerTiming has an associated ordered map params, initially empty.

The PerformanceResourceTiming interface, which this specification partially extends, is defined in [RESOURCE-TIMING].

[Exposed=(Window,Worker)]
partial interface PerformanceResourceTiming {
  readonly attribute FrozenArray<PerformanceServerTiming> serverTiming;
};

The serverTiming getter steps are the following:

Let entries be a new list.
For each field in this's timing info's server-timing headers:
1. Let metric be the result of parsing field.
2. If metric is not null, append metric to entries.
Return entries.

This section is non-normative.

The interfaces defined in this specification expose potentially sensitive application and infrastructure information to any web page that has included a resource that advertises server timing metrics. For this reason the access to PerformanceServerTiming interface is restricted by the same origin policy by default. Resource providers can explicitly allow server timing information to be available by adding the Timing-Allow-Origin HTTP response header, as defined in [RESOURCE-TIMING], that specifies the domains that may be allowed to access the server metrics, but the user agent MAY keep the same origin policy restriction.

In addition to using the Timing-Allow-Origin HTTP response header, the server can also use relevant logic to control which metrics are returned, when, and to whom - e.g. the server may only provide certain metrics to correctly authenticated users and nothing at all to all others.

The permanent message header field registry should be updated with the following registrations ([RFC3864]):

This section is non-normative.

Example 1

> GET /resource HTTP/1.1
> Host: example.com


< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Server-Timing: miss, db;dur=53, app;dur=47.2
< Server-Timing: customView, dc;desc=atl
< Server-Timing: cache;desc="Cache Read";dur=23.2
< Trailer: Server-Timing
< (... snip response body ...)
< Server-Timing: total;dur=123.4

Name	Duration	Description
miss
db	53
app	47.2
customView
dc	atl
cache	23.2	Cache Read
total	123.4

The above header fields communicate six distinct metrics that illustrate all the possible ways for the server to communicate data to the user agent: metric name only, metric with value, metric with value and description, and metric with description. For example, the above metrics may indicate that for example.com/resource.jpg fetch:

There was a cache miss.
The request was routed through the "atl" datacenter ("dc").
The database ("db") time was 53 ms.
A cache read took 23.2 ms.
The application server ("app") took 47.2ms to process "customView" template or function.
The total time for the request-response cycle on the server was 123.4ms, which is recorded at the end of the response and delivered via a trailer field.

The application can collect, process, and act on the provided metrics via the provided JavaScript interface:

Example 2

// serverTiming entries can live on 'navigation' and 'resource' entries
for (const entryType of ['navigation', 'resource']) {
  for (const {name: url, serverTiming} of performance.getEntriesByType(entryType)) {
    // iterate over the serverTiming array
    for (const {name, duration, description} of serverTiming) {
      // we only care about "slow" ones
      if (duration > 200) {
        console.info('Slow server-timing entry =',
          JSON.stringify({url, entryType, name, duration, description}, null, 2))
      }
    }
  }
}

This section is non-normative.

Server processing time can be a significant fraction of the total request time. For example, a dynamic response may require one or more database queries, cache lookups, API calls, time to process relevant data and render the response, and so on. Similarly, even a static response can be delayed due to overloaded servers, slow caches, or other reasons.

Today, the user agent developer tools are able to show when the request was initiated, and when the first and last bytes of the response were received. However, there is no visibility into where or how the time was spent on the server, which means that the developer is unable to quickly diagnose if there is a performance bottleneck on the server, and if so, in which component. Today, to answer this question, the developer is required to use different techniques: check the server logs, embed performance data within the response (if possible), use external tools, and so on. This makes identifying and diagnosing performance bottlenecks hard, and in many cases impractical.

Server Timing defines a standard mechanism that enables the server to communicate relevant performance metrics to the client and allows the client to surface them directly in the developer tools - e.g. the requests can be annotated with server sent metrics to provide insight into where or how the time was spent while generating the response.

In addition to surfacing server sent performance metrics in the developer tools, a standard JavaScript interface enables analytics tools to automatically collect, process, beacon, and aggregate these metrics for operational and performance analysis.

Server Timing enables origin servers to communicate performance metrics about where or how time is spent while processing the request. However, the same request and response may also be routed through one or more multiple proxies (e.g. cache servers, load balancers, and so on), each of which may introduce own delays and may want to provide performance metrics into where or how the time is spent.

For example, a CDN edge node may want to report which data center was being used, if the resource was available in cache, and how long it took to retrieve the response from cache or from the origin server. Further, the same process may be repeated by other proxies, thus allowing full end-to-end visibility into how the request was routed and where the time was spent.

Similarly, when a Service Worker is active, some or all of the navigation and resource requests may be routed through it. Effectively, an active Service Worker is a local proxy that is able to reroute requests, serve cached responses, synthesize responses, and more. As a result, Server Timing enables Service Worker to report custom performance metrics about how the request was processed: whether it was fetched from a server or served from local cache, duration of relevant the processing steps, and so on.

This section is non-normative.

This document reuses text from the [NAVIGATION-TIMING], [RESOURCE-TIMING], [PERFORMANCE-TIMELINE-2], and [RFC6797] specifications as permitted by the licenses of those specifications.

[fetch]

Fetch Standard. Anne van Kesteren. WHATWG. Living Standard. URL: https://fetch.spec.whatwg.org/

[hr-time]

High Resolution Time. Yoav Weiss. W3C. 22 March 2023. W3C Working Draft. URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/hr-time-3/

[html]

HTML Standard. Anne van Kesteren; Domenic Denicola; Ian Hickson; Philip Jägenstedt; Simon Pieters. WHATWG. Living Standard. URL: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/

[infra]

Infra Standard. Anne van Kesteren; Domenic Denicola. WHATWG. Living Standard. URL: https://infra.spec.whatwg.org/

[RESOURCE-TIMING]

Resource Timing. Yoav Weiss; Noam Rosenthal. W3C. 4 October 2022. W3C Candidate Recommendation. URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/resource-timing-2/

[RFC2119]

Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels. S. Bradner. IETF. March 1997. Best Current Practice. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119

[RFC3864]

Registration Procedures for Message Header Fields. G. Klyne; M. Nottingham; J. Mogul. IETF. September 2004. Best Current Practice. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3864

[RFC5234]

Augmented BNF for Syntax Specifications: ABNF. D. Crocker, Ed.; P. Overell. IETF. January 2008. Internet Standard. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5234

[RFC7230]

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Message Syntax and Routing. R. Fielding, Ed.; J. Reschke, Ed.. IETF. June 2014. Proposed Standard. URL: https://httpwg.org/specs/rfc7230.html

[RFC8174]

Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words. B. Leiba. IETF. May 2017. Best Current Practice. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8174

[WEBIDL]

Web IDL Standard. Edgar Chen; Timothy Gu. WHATWG. Living Standard. URL: https://webidl.spec.whatwg.org/

[NAVIGATION-TIMING]

Navigation Timing. Zhiheng Wang. W3C. 17 December 2012. W3C Recommendation. URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/navigation-timing/

[PERFORMANCE-TIMELINE-2]

Performance Timeline. Nicolas Pena Moreno. W3C. 15 November 2022. W3C Candidate Recommendation. URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/performance-timeline/

[RFC6797]

HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS). J. Hodges; C. Jackson; A. Barth. IETF. November 2012. Proposed Standard. URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6797

Server Timing (original) (raw)

Abstract

Status of This Document

Table of Contents