When we set out to ask Wikipedia visitors their opinion of page load performance, our main hope was to answer an age-old question: which RUM metric matters the most to users? And more interestingly, which ones matter the most to our users on our content.
We’ve recently published research on performance perception that we did last year. The micro survey used in this study is still running on multiple Wikipedia languages and gives us insights into perceived performance.
We use both synthetic and RUM testing for Wikipedia. These two ways of testing performance are best friends and help us verify regressions. Today, we will look at two regressions where it helped us to get metrics both ways.