This action occurred while the window was in the background

[Swati_Bhat]

Hello!

I am seeing this in waterfall analysis. Does any one know what does it mean?

Thanks in Advance..

[Eric_Yu]

Hi!
I think you missed the attachment, or it failed to load. Can you reupload it?

[Swati_Bhat]

here is the screenshot - 

[Eric_Yu]

Is this a mobile or web session?

[Eric_Yu]

If we're talking about web, it means exaclty that "This action occurred while the window was in the background".

For instance, in Firefox, you'd have the Document.visibilityState flag, bg=1 meaning the window is in a background state.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/visibilityState.

In some cases, you might get a message like:

The browser went into the background while the action was active. Timings might not be 100% accurate due to reduced timer resolution

[Swati_Bhat]

Hi Eric , 

Thanks for helping with the details . This data is from a mobile device using a browser based application.

Needed some more understanding - This background activity is only being seen when resposne time of this user action is extremely high. So what does it actually mean that the activity is being perfromed in background.

[Eric_Yu · Accepted solution]

Hi Swati, so your mobile application is opening a webview inside the app?

Seems like the problem here is that the WebView component is being opened inside the mobile app and the end-user might be switching between apps or minimizing it and causing the Document.visibilityState flag change from visible to hidden.

It might be worth checking if any action during the loading of those resources has conditions based on visibility changes, such as pausing animations, stoping background task or freeing resources for usage optimization that might be reflecting on high duration of your user actions.