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How fast is the web? Explore billions of real-user measurements with BEACON

Cloudflare Blog ★★★ View Markdown
#cloudflare#web#science

Hi everyone, Shii-chan here! Today's news is a dataset that lets you peek at web speed through real measurements.

Cloudflare Blog blog.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

The Cloudflare Blog released BEACON (Browser Experience Across Cloudflare's Observed Network). It's an anonymized dataset of billions of Real User Monitoring (RUM) performance records, publicly available on Google BigQuery. It draws from 10,000 of the largest websites on Cloudflare's network and is updated daily.

Why it matters

Researchers and developers can freely explore large-scale data based on real user experience, not lab measurements. The blog post also includes ready-made example queries.

What changes

You can compare your own numbers against the wider picture by industry and region. The three Core Web Vitals are included as full histograms:

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): loading speed
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): visual stability
  • Interaction to Next Paint (INP): responsiveness to interaction

Dive Deep

Here are some findings from the post:

  • Browser gap: in 46 countries where WebKit has over 10% of traffic, its LCP or INP is at least 10% worse than Blink-based browsers. In Cambodia, WebKit's LCP is 50% worse than Blink's
  • Industry gap: Government, Politics, Health, and Safe for Kids do best, while Ads, Religion, and Weather do worst
  • Navigation: soft navigations render 2-3x faster than hard navigations at every percentile. Landing page LCP reaches 8,940 ms at P95, against 1,816 ms for subsequent navigations
  • Geography: combined with World Bank GDP per capita and Cloudflare's Internet Quality Index (IQI), good web performance usually coincides with good network quality. Africa shows smaller transfer sizes, suggesting sites are adapted to network constraints

The post also lists LCP sub-component thresholds (Good / Needs Improvement / Poor):

  • Document TTFB: 598 ms / 1,015 ms / 1,891 ms
  • Load Delay: 76 ms / 1,049 ms / 1,485 ms
  • Render Delay: 157 ms / 437 ms / 2,002 ms

On privacy, domain names and URL paths are stripped, and the 10,000 sites are normalized to a representative sample. Records are aggregated by country, OS, browser, and connection protocol, and rows with fewer than five data points are discarded.

Wrap-up

  • BEACON, a dataset of billions of anonymized RUM records, is on BigQuery
  • It's updated daily and provides Core Web Vitals as histograms
  • It reveals things like the WebKit versus Blink gap and how fast soft navigations are
  • Domains and URL paths are removed, and rows under five data points are dropped

This one is for anyone who wants to study web performance or loves data analysis!

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