How Does Rigor Collect Data?
Continuous Data Collection
To ensure maximum accuracy and precision, Rigor collects performance data continuously while testing a website. This means that while every step of a script is running, Rigor is collecting metrics, recording custom user timings, and capturing screenshots. When a check runs, Rigor collects and reports network data and filmstrips during the entire scripted flow. This ensures that the user can see a filmstrip and video of all the user actions, all of the requests/responses that occurred in the waterfall, and all of the browser, timing, or UX events that occur during the run of the script. The results of this data can be trended on a Performance KPI graph, alerted as a threshold, and can be viewed in the Run Results page.
Understanding Run Results
For any check run result that has screen captures, both a filmstrip and video will be available. You can scroll through the filmstrip, or scrub the video at different speeds. Full-sized screen captures are also available for download from the Filmstrip widget.
Click the video button to watch a real time, slow motion or accelerated playback of the rendered content loaded by that runner result. You can also download any video for sharing with your teammates.
If a run visited multiple pages, a page selector dropdown will be available to jump to any single page in the results to view metrics, filmstrips and a waterfall specific to that page.
Click any of the screenshots to open the Filmstrip Screenshot Viewer to see a larger image. Inside this viewer, navigate forward and back to more easily view any visual changes.
Changing the Interval Between Frames
By default, only visual changes are shown in the filmstrip, but you can use the interval selector in the filmstrip header to adjust the period between frames. Available intervals are Every 100 ms, Every 500 ms, and Every 1 s.
Any interval that is set after page load will persist across different pages, but will always reset to "Every Visual Change" on page load.
Page Transitions
You may notice in filmstrips for muiti-page flows that images from the prior page show up at the start of the next page, as is shown below.
While this may seem counter-intuitive, this is actually how the browser renders pages from one to the next. When navigating away from the current page, the existing page is not replaced with a white frame, but instead remains rendered as-is until the first paint of the new page beings. You can see that in your own day to day experience in any modern web browser (and more importantly, that's what your users see as well), and inevitably leads to a better user experience since you still have the ability to read rendered content while waiting for the next page.
The Rigor filmstrips begin loading each page at a 0ms ticker (reset with each new page) and begin transition to the next page when the fully loaded event is fired.
Sharing Page-Specific Views
Navigation between pages is persisted in the URL, so sharing a page is as easy as copying and pasting the current URL. By default, the All Pages summary will load if a specific page has not been selected.
Viewing Multiple Pages
On the All Pages view, these modules display timing data across all the pages visited during that run, so you can quickly analyze your check results and find outliers. Hover over a single bar to view all other values for that single page, or click on a bar to drill down for more page-specific details.
For more information about these metrics, click check out our Performance Metrics Glossary.
Select a page from the dropdown to view page-specific data. Click on a timing metric to auto-scroll the filmstrip to that point in time. This allows you to easily correlate your timing data with what a user would see when visiting your site.
In Closing
Beyond the addition of new metrics and visualization features, we've integrated all these results into one easy to navigate and share page to streamline your analysis workflow. And as before, you can click the Analyze button on any page in the workflow to run a detailed Rigor Optimization performance analysis of that page.
We hope these updates are helpful in identifying and resolving the causes of slow performance on your site.