Benchmarking the impact of session recording on performance
Blog post from PostHog
Session recording (SR) tools, popular among marketers and product managers for understanding user experiences, have raised privacy, ethical, and technical questions, particularly regarding their impact on browser performance. Despite some SR providers claiming no performance impact, any script, including SR, inevitably incurs some CPU, memory, and network bandwidth usage. The introduction of the MutationObserver API in 2012 marked a turning point for SR, allowing it to operate efficiently by tracking DOM changes without significant performance hits. Tests conducted using PostHog, an open-source SR platform, on various SaaS applications showed negligible impact on memory and network performance, even with extensive use, thanks to the efficient handling of data changes by the MutationObserver API. Although SR might theoretically affect network performance under specific conditions, such instances are rare, allowing SR tools to offer detailed user insights without compromising browser performance substantially.
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