Overhead

Palette is designed to be as lightweight as possible. All performance overhead opt-in.

CPU

Overhead is configurable, so there's no fixed overhead on the profiler. You can configure the profiler's sampling interval. A lower interval will give you more accurate results, but will also increase the overhead. The recommended interval is 10ms, which is a good balance between accuracy and overhead.

In the browser, Palette uses the JS Self-Profiler API. None of our largest customers (>100M users) have reported noticable performance regressions after enabling the profiler. From Facebook's use of the API, Facebook has reported profiling slows load time by <1% (p=0.05). In Chrome, the JS Self-Profiler API hooks directly into V8's internal profiler, allowing for native and efficient profiling.

Network

Palette compresses network payloads asynchronously, off the main thread. Gzip compression is used in browsers via the CompressionStream API and Brotli in Node and Electron apps. All payloads are sent when the user is idle or the user has backgrounded the browser tab or electron app.

Bundle Size

Palette has a lightweight footprint. The browser client is <6kb gzipped and minified, which is 82% smaller than react-dom and 89% smaller than Sentry.