9.7 KiB
stage | group | info | type |
---|---|---|---|
Verify | Testing | To determine the technical writer assigned to the Stage/Group associated with this page, see https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/ux/technical-writing/#assignments | reference, howto |
Browser Performance Testing (PREMIUM)
Introduced in GitLab Premium 10.3.
If your application offers a web interface and you're using GitLab CI/CD, you can quickly determine the rendering performance impact of pending code changes in the browser.
NOTE: You can automate this feature in your applications by using Auto DevOps.
Overview
GitLab uses Sitespeed.io, a free and open source
tool, for measuring the rendering performance of web sites. The
Sitespeed plugin that GitLab built outputs
the performance score for each page analyzed in a file called browser-performance.json
this data can be shown on Merge Requests.
Use cases
Consider the following workflow:
- A member of the marketing team is attempting to track engagement by adding a new tool.
- With browser performance metrics, they see how their changes are impacting the usability of the page for end users.
- The metrics show that after their changes, the performance score of the page has gone down.
- When looking at the detailed report, they see the new JavaScript library was
included in
<head>
, which affects loading page speed. - They ask for help from a front end developer, who sets the library to load asynchronously.
- The frontend developer approves the merge request, and authorizes its deployment to production.
How browser performance testing works
First, define a job in your .gitlab-ci.yml
file that generates the
Browser Performance report artifact.
GitLab then checks this report, compares key performance metrics for each page
between the source and target branches, and shows the information in the merge request.
For an example Performance job, see Configuring Browser Performance Testing.
NOTE:
If the Browser Performance report has no data to compare, such as when you add the
Browser Performance job in your .gitlab-ci.yml
for the very first time,
the Browser Performance report widget doesn't show. It must have run at least
once on the target branch (master
, for example), before it displays in a
merge request targeting that branch.
Configuring Browser Performance Testing
This example shows how to run the sitespeed.io container on your code by using GitLab CI/CD and sitespeed.io using Docker-in-Docker.
-
First, set up GitLab Runner with a Docker-in-Docker build.
-
Configure the default Browser Performance Testing CI job as follows in your
.gitlab-ci.yml
file:include: template: Verify/Browser-Performance.gitlab-ci.yml performance: variables: URL: https://example.com
NOTE:
For versions before 12.4, see the information for older GitLab versions.
If you are using a Kubernetes cluster, use template: Jobs/Browser-Performance-Testing.gitlab-ci.yml
instead.
The above example creates a performance
job in your CI/CD pipeline and runs
sitespeed.io against the webpage you defined in URL
to gather key metrics.
The example uses a CI/CD template that is included in all GitLab installations since 12.4, but it doesn't work with Kubernetes clusters. If you are using GitLab 12.3 or older, you must add the configuration manually
The template uses the GitLab plugin for sitespeed.io, and it saves the full HTML sitespeed.io report as a Browser Performance report artifact that you can later download and analyze. This implementation always takes the latest Browser Performance artifact available. If GitLab Pages is enabled, you can view the report directly in your browser.
You can also customize the jobs with CI/CD variables:
SITESPEED_IMAGE
: Configure the Docker image to use for the job (defaultsitespeedio/sitespeed.io
), but not the image version.SITESPEED_VERSION
: Configure the version of the Docker image to use for the job (default14.1.0
).SITESPEED_OPTIONS
: Configure any additional sitespeed.io options as required (defaultnil
). Refer to the sitespeed.io documentation for more details.
For example, you can override the number of runs sitespeed.io makes on the given URL, and change the version:
include:
template: Verify/Browser-Performance.gitlab-ci.yml
performance:
variables:
URL: https://www.sitespeed.io/
SITESPEED_VERSION: 13.2.0
SITESPEED_OPTIONS: -n 5
Configuring degradation threshold
Introduced in GitLab 13.0.
You can configure the sensitivity of degradation alerts to avoid getting alerts for minor drops in metrics.
This is done by setting the DEGRADATION_THRESHOLD
CI/CD variable. In the example below, the alert only shows up
if the Total Score
metric degrades by 5 points or more:
include:
template: Verify/Browser-Performance.gitlab-ci.yml
performance:
variables:
URL: https://example.com
DEGRADATION_THRESHOLD: 5
The Total Score
metric is based on sitespeed.io's coach performance score. There is more information in the coach documentation.
Performance testing on Review Apps
The above CI YAML configuration is great for testing against static environments, and it can be extended for dynamic environments, but a few extra steps are required:
- The
performance
job should run after the dynamic environment has started. - In the
review
job:- Generate a URL list file with the dynamic URL.
- Save the file as an artifact, for example with
echo $CI_ENVIRONMENT_URL > environment_url.txt
in your job'sscript
. - Pass the list as the URL environment variable (which can be a URL or a file containing URLs)
to the
performance
job.
- You can now run the sitespeed.io container against the desired hostname and paths.
Your .gitlab-ci.yml
file would look like:
stages:
- deploy
- performance
include:
template: Verify/Browser-Performance.gitlab-ci.yml
review:
stage: deploy
environment:
name: review/$CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG
url: http://$CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG.$APPS_DOMAIN
script:
- run_deploy_script
- echo $CI_ENVIRONMENT_URL > environment_url.txt
artifacts:
paths:
- environment_url.txt
only:
- branches
except:
- master
performance:
dependencies:
- review
variables:
URL: environment_url.txt
GitLab versions 12.3 and older
Browser Performance Testing has gone through several changes since it's introduction. In this section we detail these changes and how you can run the test based on your GitLab version:
- In GitLab 12.4 a job template was made available.
- In 13.2 the feature was renamed from
Performance
toBrowser Performance
with additional template CI/CD variables. The job name in the template is stillperformance
for compatibility reasons, but may be renamed to match in a future iteration. - For 11.5 to 12.3 no template is available and the job has to be defined manually as follows:
performance:
stage: performance
image: docker:git
variables:
URL: https://example.com
SITESPEED_VERSION: 14.1.0
SITESPEED_OPTIONS: ''
services:
- docker:stable-dind
script:
- mkdir gitlab-exporter
- wget -O ./gitlab-exporter/index.js https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gl-performance/raw/1.1.0/index.js
- mkdir sitespeed-results
- docker run --shm-size=1g --rm -v "$(pwd)":/sitespeed.io sitespeedio/sitespeed.io:$SITESPEED_VERSION --plugins.add ./gitlab-exporter --outputFolder sitespeed-results $URL $SITESPEED_OPTIONS
- mv sitespeed-results/data/performance.json performance.json
artifacts:
paths:
- performance.json
- sitespeed-results/
reports:
performance: performance.json
- For 11.4 and earlier the job should be defined as follows:
performance:
stage: performance
image: docker:git
variables:
URL: https://example.com
services:
- docker:stable-dind
script:
- mkdir gitlab-exporter
- wget -O ./gitlab-exporter/index.js https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gl-performance/raw/1.1.0/index.js
- mkdir sitespeed-results
- docker run --shm-size=1g --rm -v "$(pwd)":/sitespeed.io sitespeedio/sitespeed.io:6.3.1 --plugins.add ./gitlab-exporter --outputFolder sitespeed-results $URL
- mv sitespeed-results/data/performance.json performance.json
artifacts:
paths:
- performance.json
- sitespeed-results/
Upgrading to the latest version and using the templates is recommended, to ensure you receive the latest updates, including updates to the sitespeed.io versions.