Amplitude support in web workers?

[troygibb]

If you write the following in a webpack bundled app:

import amplitude from from 'amplitude-js';

And this statement occurs within a web-worker context, you get Uncaught ReferenceError: window is not defined from this block:

} else if (window.globalStorage) {
      // Firefox 2-3 use globalStorage
      // See https://developer.mozilla.org/en/dom/storage#globalStorage
      try {
        localStorage = window.globalStorage[window.location.hostname];
      } catch (e) {// Something bad happened...
      }
    } 

Is there any plan to support amplitude within a web worker?

[troygibb]

Hello, any update on this?

[haoliu-amp]

@troygibb Web workers don't have access to all the DOM api. That's why.

[troygibb]

@haoliu-amp but web workers still have access to host info, you could still send events. Although I understand that it'll be difficult to correlate sessions between main thread and worker threads.

What DOM api do you need access to?

[blazzy]

I don't think web workers have access to cookie storage and local storage.

It might be possible to pull off web worker support, since there are fall backs in place to use an in memory store when those aren't available. Not sure if other roadblocks would pop up.

There would be a loss of resiliency if a browser closes or crashes before some events are sent successfully. And yeah every window, tab, and web worker would be treated as a separate session without the cookie store.

We don't have any plans for web worker support, but we might be able take a quick stab at seeing if it could be coaxed to run in a web worker, without solving for the above. Could you share a bit more about your motivation/use case here?

[raphaelbs]

@blazzy about the motivation/use case,
I can speak for the project that I'm currently working on: The Amplitude sdk is half of the size of the main entry chunk.

Attachments

We manually include the sdk in a common chunk.

The application main chunk:

I haven't measured how much CPU time the SDK is consuming from the main-thread, but the SDK size alone is already a performance concern.

One possibility to improve key indicators for the webapp is to decouple third-party libraries into web-workers.

I'm open to suggestions though!

[kevinpagtakhan]

We just released v8.14.0 which includes support for web worker environments. We'd totally appreciate if you can provide any feedback on this new feature.