Interesting Engineering

Exfiltrating General System Performance via JavaScript This is a somewhat technical article with an intended audience of engineers and data scientists. But if you are curious about system performance in in-field metrics, fear not! The TL;DR; I measured general hardware and system performance across hundreds of models, dozens of chipsets, and millions of devices in an application-agnostic manner in HTML5 environments—all without low-level interfaces or APIs! Here are some (anonymized) example metrics:. Overall System Performance Distribution, All Systems Overall System Performance Histogram, by Model X-axis is response time in milliseconds Y axis is total samples per bucket. Overall System Performance, by Chipset From these we can infer lots of interesting details that may be helpful for: Improving app performance Identifying devices with performance issues Seeing if targeted performance improvements for these actually worked. Understanding the distribution and character of device popul...