Configure Test Settings

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Test Profiles provide a way for you to set test conditions for your Site that your customers may experience. By configuring Test Profiles, you can emulate popular devices (like iPhones, iPads and Samsung Galaxy phones), throttle network connectivity, set custom headers or cookies, block ads or JavaScript.

Whether you’re looking to replicate the experience of a mobile user on a slow connection or evaluate the impact of third-party scripts, Test Profiles offer the flexibility to tailor your testing environment to your requirements.

Test Profiles can be found for each site in Calibre by navigating to Site → Synthetic → Settings → Test Profiles.

Throttling types and settings

When running performance tests, it’s crucial to apply network settings that accurately reflect the conditions your users may face. Calibre provides two primary modes of throttling—Simulated Throttling and Runtime Throttling.

Simulated throttling

Simulated Throttling is used by PageSpeed Desktop and PageSpeed Mobile device presets, where device and network conditions are emulated after the test has completed. This approach is used by Google Lighthouse and services that rely on Lighthouse, such as Google PageSpeed Insights or performance tests run directly in Google Chrome browser.

Runtime throttling

Runtime Throttling applies network throttling during each test, providing a more realistic simulation of user conditions. Runtime throttling is used for all Calibre Test Profiles, except for PageSpeed device presets.

Default Test Profiles

When you monitor a new Site, Calibre creates two default Test Profiles automatically:

Name	Device Emulation	Connection Speed
PageSpeed Desktop A desktop class device with simulated network throttling.	Unthrottled CPU. Viewport: 1350×940 px, DPR 1.	PageSpeed Desktop
PageSpeed Mobile A mobile class device with simulated network throttling.	Moto G Power. Viewport: 412×823 px, DPR 1.75.	PageSpeed Mobile

Device presets

Device presets are a set of predefined device configurations that include CPU speed, viewport dimensions, pixel ratio, and User-Agent. These presets are based on real-world devices and are used to emulate the experience of browsing your Site on a specific device.

We selected the devices below to reflect market trends in adoption and a diverse set of resolutions, processor capabilities and price ranges. You can use them to experiment different user scenarios.

Name	Year of Release	Viewport	Single Core Score 1
Samsung Galaxy A12	2020	360×800 px	149
Samsung Galaxy Tab A7	2020	1428×857 px	308
Motorola Moto G Power	2020	415×884 px	311
Oppo Reno 7	2022	360×662 px	388
iPhone SE	2022	320×568 px	535
Samsung Galaxy A52s	2021	412×915 px	713
iPad Pro (3rd gen)	2021	834×1075 px	1143
iPhone 11	2019	414×896 px	1311
iPad (9th gen)	2021	810×1010 px	1326
iPad mini (6th gen)	2021	744×1133 px	1564
iPhone 12	2020	390×664 px	1573
iPad Air (5th gen)	2022	820×1061 px	1706

Discontinued device presets

Name	Year of Release	Viewport	Single Core Score1
Motorola Moto G4	2016	360×640 px	112
Galaxy S5	2014	360×640 px	153
Nexus 5X	2015	412×732 px	170
Nexus 6P	2015	412×732 px	207
iPhone 6	2014	375×667 px	306
iPhone 7	2016	375×667 px	721
iPhone 5	2012	320×568 px	754
iPad (4th gen)	2012	768×1024 px	807
iPhone 8	2017	375×667 px	909
iPad Pro (1st gen)	2016	1024×1366 px	1116

Network connection speed

Calibre limits the bandwidth available to Chrome browser using pre-configured network speed options that best reflect average global connectivity.

Label	Latency	Downstream	Throttling method
PageSpeed Desktop	40ms	10.24 MB/s	Simulated throttling
PageSpeed Mobile	150ms	1.638 MB/s	Simulated throttling (Slow 4G)
No bandwidth throttling	-	-	N/A
Regular 2G	300ms	256 KB/s	Runtime throttling
Good 2G	150ms	460.80 KB/s	Runtime throttling
Slow 3G	400ms	320 KB/s	Runtime throttling
Regular 3G	300ms	768 KB/s	Runtime throttling
Good 3G	150ms	1.57 MB/s	Runtime throttling
Emerging markets 3G	400ms	3.2 MB/s	Runtime throttling
Regular 4G	170ms	12.19 MB/s	Runtime throttling
4G LTE	70ms	24 MB/s	Runtime throttling
DSL	30ms	2.10 MB/s	Runtime throttling
WiFi	10ms	31.46 MB/s	Runtime throttling
Cable	20ms	40 MB/s	Runtime throttling

Cookies

Setting custom cookies can be helpful in a variety of scenarios. The most common implementations include:

• Authenticating Calibre to your web application.
• Turning off advertising to ease troubleshooting of developer-specific regressions.
• Testing against an A/B test or staff-shipped feature.

Headers

Custom headers are useful for setting Authorisation headers for basic authentication or for triggering certain conditions for your Pages.

Blocking third party scripts

Calibre automatically detects third party providers during testing, based on a custom instance of Third Party Web dataset. When creating or editing a Test Profile, choose which providers you would like to the requests will be blocked when Snapshots run.

Each provider is listed with a Last Detected date. Some of the registered third parties can no longer be present on your Site but were included in the past. When blocking, make sure to include active third parties for reliable results.

We recommend experimenting with turning off:

• Chat widgets and communication tools.
• Scripts providing polyfills.
• Analytics software.
• Bug tracking scripts.

Blocking requests to nominated hostnames

You can use Host Blocking to block requests to specified hostnames. Block rules are added one host per line, and include the ability to match wildcard subdomains (e.g.: *.example.com).

Blocking JavaScript

Turning off JavaScript is an excellent strategy in discovering potential functionality and accessibility issues when JavaScript execution fails or is not reliable.

When creating or editing a Test Profile, select “Block JavaScript Requests” to ignore all external JavaScript requests. When JavaScript is blocked, all requests except inline script (<script>my script</script>) included on the page will be halted.