Cloudflare Launches BEACON Dataset for Real-User Web Performance Analysis

Cloudflare has announced the launch of BEACON, an anonymized dataset built from billions of real-world performance measurements across 10,000 of the largest websites on its network. The dataset aims to provide researchers, browser vendors, developers, and standards groups with an unprecedented view of how the web performs across browsers, devices, and countries.

BEACON covers every major browser engine and is updated daily in Google BigQuery. It uses standards defined by the community-led RUM Archive, a publicly available Real User Monitoring (RUM) database. By expanding the footprint of the RUM Archive project 100-fold, BEACON offers a scale and level of geographic and browser diversity that has not previously been publicly available.

Cloudflare has collected this kind of telemetry for years on behalf of its customers, giving them a customer-specific, detailed understanding of how real users experience their sites. Today, the company is opening this view up to everyone, allowing researchers and developers to study web performance at a scale and level of diversity that has not been previously accessible.

The BEACON dataset includes data from billions of real-world performance measurements, providing insights into the performance of the web across different browsers, devices, and countries. Cloudflare hopes that researchers, browser vendors, developers, and standards groups will use this dataset to identify where the web falls short and help make fast experiences available to everyone.

A special shout out to Cloudflare’s 1,111 intern project, which contributed significantly to the launch of this project. Thanks to Chisara Duru and Tong Zhou for their hard work and contributions.

Source: cloudflare