Stats on mobile Web app performance

[mul...@gmail.com]

To HTTP Archive,

I'm writing an contributed article for client (whom I can't name) on the subject of mobile Web app performance. The premise is that as app developers add features, video, richer graphics and other enhancements to mobile applications to gain users, make them more "sticky," etc., that creates a drag on performance that can actually diminish the experience. I'm look for stats on HTTPArchive that would illustrate that. Perhaps "time to first paint," "time to first interact," response time or other measures of app responsiveness. I've looked through the site and of the many charts and graphs depicted, I can't seem to find any that speak to these specific mobile app performance metrics. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Robert Mullins

Freelance Corp Comm Writer

Silicon Valley, CA

[Charlie Clark]

Luke Wroblewski's presentations on apps are an excellent place to start as
he's never afraid to test assumptions and share his results with the
world. Google's own research on making YouTube load faster and as a result
see a huge jump in use is also another excellent starting point. I've also
noticed that WPT has started to collect the notional cost for downloading
a page on a mobile device but I don't think this is being included in the
database yet.

One key metric is the number of DOM objects. x86 has much better
single-threaded performance than ARM and you *really* notice this on
mobile devices. As the DOM has to be loaded before anything else can
happen it's important to keep this low. This is borne out in the
correlation charts with # DOM objects correlating closely with page load
time.

Charlie
--
Charlie Clark
Managing Director
Clark Consulting & Research
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