How fast is the web? Explore billions of real-user measurements with BEACON
Curated from Cloudflare Blog
Most performance tools measure what you think happens in a lab, not what actually breaks in production. Cloudflare’s open-sourcing of the BEACON dataset shifts the focus from synthetic benchmarks to raw, real-world user experience. By exposing billions of anonymized RUM records on BigQuery, it removes the paywall that usually sits between teams and true user-centric data. This is particularly valuable for SREs who need to validate whether their latency budgets align with actual user perception across diverse networks and devices. You can finally cross-reference your own synthetic traces against global baselines without guessing. Takeaway: Run a simple query to compare your p75 LCP against the global median for your specific region; if you are significantly slower, investigate network egress constraints before blaming your application code.
Cloudflare is open-sourcing the BEACON dataset, making billions of anonymized Real User Monitoring (RUM) performance records publicly available on Google BigQuery. Explore real-world Core Web Vitals, soft navigation metrics, and performance breakdowns across browsers and regions.
— Cloudflare Blog