throttle cpu and network conditions in puppeteer using a cdpsession for performance testing
domain: pptr.dev · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
create a CDP session with await page.target().createCDPSession() (or the higher-level page.createCDPSession() depending on the installed version)
send client.send('Network.enable') followed by client.send('Network.emulateNetworkConditions', { offline: false, downloadThroughput, uploadThroughput, latency }) to simulate a constrained connection such as slow 3G
send client.send('Emulation.setCPUThrottlingRate', { rate: 4 }) to simulate a CPU roughly four times slower than the test machine
run the page interaction or navigation under test and measure timing metrics (e.g. via the Performance API or Lighthouse-style metrics) under the throttled conditions
reset throttling (rate: 1, and network conditions back to unrestricted) at the end of the test so it does not leak into subsequent tests sharing the same page or context
Known gotchas
these are raw CDP commands, not part of Puppeteer's stable high-level API, so exact throttling parameter names and availability can shift between Chrome versions
CPU and network throttling apply to the page/session they were set on and are not automatically cleared between tests reusing the same page instance
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