Solving the mystery of PostHog’s missing session recordings

PostHog's Session Recording feature, an open-source session replay tool, has undergone significant improvements, reducing missing recordings from 15% to less than 1% and enhancing user experience. Initially, missing recordings were a major issue, attributed to errors like "Max data upload size exceeded," thought to be caused by large image data URLs. By implementing filters to manage data upload size and refining how recordings are split and snapshots are taken in single-page applications, the team resolved the bulk of these issues. The use of RRWeb for capturing and replaying DOM changes was crucial, and the fix involved ensuring new full snapshots were taken when recordings were split due to user inactivity. This led to a notable increase in the feature's usage, with weekly active users rising 2.5 times and doubling their recording views. Although missing recordings are now below 1%, ongoing efforts focus on resolving potential data compression errors or slow network issues that might contribute to this minimal remaining discrepancy.

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