Several factors contribute to the time it takes for an Audit to complete, including the following:
Page load time. The ObservePoint engine loads each page of the Audit in a browser. The faster a page loads, the faster the Audit completes.
Network silence. After each page loads, the Audit waits for a network silence of three seconds before proceeding to the next page. If the three seconds of silence are not reached, the wait will timeout after fifteen seconds. Noisy tags that fire repeatedly is ignored for purposes of network silence, though they are captured and reported on (see Ignored Tags for a list of specific tags that are ignored).
Simultaneous connections. As many as 10 connections, or servers, are used at once to run an Audit, potentially generating dozens of page loads per minute. A best practice is to whitelist ObservePoint's IP addresses. Alternatively, you can throttle Audits to a single connection (Reduce Server Load option), but this dramatically reduces the Audit's speed. Auditor by Adobe always uses a single connection.
Page retries. If a page cannot load, such as with a 404 error, or an expected tag is not found, the Audit will return to that URL later in the Audit. The Audit will visit a page up to three times to make sure that the error was not caused by a transient issue.
Post-processing. After an Audit has run, all the data it has collected is processed and filtered through the rules. This processing time is significant, though it doesn't take as much time as the scan itself.
Concurrent Audit limit. Each ObservePoint account can have from two to eight Audits running at the same time, depending on the contract. If an account is using all its allotted concurrent slots, any subsequent Audits queue up in line to wait for one to finish. Auditor by Adobe always runs one at a time.
Different Audit Speed Settings
ObservePoint allows you to change the number of browsers running in an Audit. You can select between 1, 10 (default number), 20, and 50 simultaneous browsers, the more browsers you have selected, the faster the Audit will be.
Note: Make sure that the ObservePoint IP addresses are whitelisted for your domain. Additional browsers may trigger your IT security alarms and cause the Audit to only report 429 errors for each page (Too many requests).
Please refer to our Allowlisting help document.
Below are estimated run times for an Audit with the default setting of 1 browser:
100-page Audit - 30-45 minutes
500-page Audit - 2.5-3 hours
1000-page Audit - 4-5 hours
10000-page Audit - 45-50 hours
Below are estimated run times for an Audit with the default setting of 10 simultaneous browsers:
100-page Audit - 3-5 minutes
500-page Audit - 20-30 minutes
1000-page Audit - 90-120 minutes
10000-page Audit - 14-18 hours
Below are estimated run times for an Audit with the setting of 20 simultaneous browsers:
100-page Audit - 2-3 minutes
500-page Audit - 7-10 minutes
1000-page Audit - 15-20 minutes
10000-page Audit - 3-4 hours
Below are estimated run times for an Audit with the setting of 50 simultaneous browsers:
100-page Audit - Instantaneous results
500-page Audit - 5-7 minutes
1000-page Audit - 10-15 minutes
10000-page Audit - 60-90 minutes