Performance and Timeline data in Appium

axemclion 2014-08-29 17:13:43 UTC #1

Appium connects to the browser using the remote debugging protocol. As a
result, no other client can take up the connection. Is there a way in
appium to get the timeline? I see that no rest call defined it.
ChromeDriver implements a logType=performance to get the timeline data.
Does it make sense for appium to support similar functionality?

axemclion 2014-08-29 17:16:20 UTC #2

I am working on creating a pull request for this. The idea is to reuse the webkit remote debug interface that appium already uses. When the desiredCapabilities has {loggingPreferences : {performance: 'ALL'} }, Timeline.start shall be called in the remote debugging.

We would then listen to eventRecorded event and save the events in a buffer.

Everytime the user calls getLog('performance'), the buffer is returned and flushed.
This is how ChromeDriver's log('performance') is implemented.

The only problem I see with this approach is an overflow of buffer, bu we could restrict the count of events in the buffer.

axemclion 2014-08-30 00:52:38 UTC #3

Here is my first attempt at it. I am able to get timeline events. Now I need to send them whenever the logs are asked for, and flush the data.

github.com/axemclion/appium/commit/perf

Would love any comments on this code. Would this break anything ?

Here is what the code does basically

Check if I need to start perf Logging
Wait till a context is set. When context is set, start timeline and listen to timeline events
Store all timeline events, and send it back when asked for.

axemclion 2014-08-30 17:02:55 UTC #4

Here is the pull request with the changes that enable performance logging

github.com/appium/appium/pull/3530

axemclion 2014-09-06 18:23:35 UTC #5

This pull request has now been accepted. Performance logs for iOS can be started using loggingPrefs:{performance:'ALL'} capability

AmarnathRayudu 2015-10-06 18:13:57 UTC #6

@axemclion,

I was wondering whether I can configure browser-perf tool to my existing iOS tests(Appium+Java).
When I start browser-perf with appium it launches the app, and it relaunches the app when I run my java tests ... please let me know whether I can run my Java tests and browser-perf together and run the tests to get the metrics.

Thanks,
Amarnath Rayudu

axemclion 2015-10-08 01:58:23 UTC #7

Browser-perf only measures the performance of webviews. You can use the tool with Java, but I would suggest simply fetching the performance log using Java instead and manipulating it.