Action-Scoped Percentile Telemetry for Frame Timing in Browser-Based Graphics Applications

Denis Saripov

Abstract


Interactive browser-based graphics applications are judged by smoothness, but production telemetry often reports averages that hide short stalls. This paper presents a low-overhead method for reporting frame timing percentiles in browser graphics applications. The method separates two metrics: frame interval, measured as the spacing between consecutive requestAnimationFrame callbacks, and CPU render duration, measured around the application render function. Samples are aggregated in fixed-duration or action-scoped windows and reported as compact percentile summaries instead of per-frame analytics events. A Canvas 2D whiteboard demo was instrumented with deterministic and browser-dependent stress injectors. In six repeated 5 s windows, a 50 ms stall before rendering raised both render-duration p95 and frame-interval p95 to 50.5 ms, whereas the same stall after rendering left render-duration p95 at 0.5 ms while frame-interval p95 rose to 50.5 ms. The results show that render duration alone misses user-visible main-thread stalls and that action-scoped percentile telemetry can identify whether a regression is inside or outside the render path.

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References


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