Radio link and Nav Timing

April 2, 2012 9:33 pm | 12 Comments

In Making a mobile connection I describe how after just a few seconds of inactivity your mobile phone demotes the radio link to your carrier network. It typically takes 1-2 seconds to re-establish the radio link to full bandwidth capacity. This is a huge delay!

A few days ago I was discussing desktop vs. mobile page load times with some web performance wonks. These times were gathered from real users via the W3C Nav Timing API. We started chatting about why the mobile times were worse – slower connection speeds, less cache space, etc. – and it hit me that taking 2 seconds to re-establish the radio link might account for much of what makes mobile sites slower, especially in RUM (Real User Monitoring) vs. synthetic testing. And I wondered:

After some initial testing it looks like the answers are:

I started by creating a Nav Timing test page that shows the values from Nav Timing. If you load the page you’ll see something like this. (Please look at page source to see how I calculate these conceptual time values.)

total time = 239 ms
dns = 119 ms
connect = 16 ms
ttfb = 61 ms
HTML = 0 ms
frontend = 42 ms

NOTE: Nav timing is available in Android 4. I’m not aware of any other mobile platform that has it, so you’ll need an Android 4 device to run these tests. You should close all/most currently running apps on your mobile device as they might be keeping the radio link alive in the background. On Android 4 this is done under Settings | Apps | Running. I had to stop Google Services.

You can determine if the radio link promotion delay occurs based on whether any of the times are greater than 2 seconds. Here’s a key:

no 2 second times

If all of the times are less than 2 seconds then the radio link was already active. You can create this result by loading the page multiple times in quick succession. All the times should be pretty fast because you have a radio link, the DNS resolution is cached, and you have a persistent connection to the web server.

dns > 2 seconds

If you wait 10-20 seconds (and closed all background apps) the radio link gets demoted. At this point clicking on one of the buttons to open the test page on another domain will force a DNS lookup. Normally the DNS lookup should take a few hundred milliseconds, but if the radio link needs to be promoted the DNS time jumps to 2000+ milliseconds. This page is hosted on three different domains. If you use all three pages thus caching all three DNS resolutions, the only way I know of to clear the DNS cache is to power cycle the phone.

connect > 2 seconds

If you allow the radio link to be demoted by waiting 10-20 seconds and reload the page (or click the button for the same page) you might see the connect time is greater than 2 seconds. This happens when the DNS is cached but there’s no persistent connection to the server. This is harder to reproduce – it depends on the browser’s policy for closing persistent connections.

ttfb > 2 seconds

If the radio link is demoted, the DNS is cached, and there’s a persistent connection to the server you’ll see the time-to-first-byte (ttfb) is greater than 2 seconds. This is what happens most frequently when you load the same page multiple times with a 10-20 second gap in-between.

It’s important that developers focusing on performance be aware of the impact of radio link promotion on nav timing for mobile traffic so you don’t waste time solving the wrong problem: If you’re gathering RUM data via nav timing and see slow DNS times, you might think about investing in your DNS infrastructure – even though those slow DNS times might be caused by radio link promotion. Similarly, if you see long connection times it might not make sense to investigate how your servers manage persistent connections. And slow time-to-first-byte values may or may not indicate a backend app layer performance problem.

My website doesn’t generate enough mobile traffic to verify this theory, but I believe that websites with enough mobile nav timing data will see bimodal distributions of their timing data for dns, connection, and ttfb where the modes are ~2 seconds apart. If anyone has enough data (you know who you are) please take a look and comment below. It might be possible to develop heuristics that help us determine when radio link delays are having an impact. I’d love to get some stats on the percentage of page views that incur this delay.