Wednesday 8 June 2011

Profiling with knobs on

A little while ago, I mentioned the core part of the profiling tool we use at stackexchange – our mini-profiler. Well, I’m delighted to say that with the input from Jarrod and Sam this tool has been evolving at an alarming rate, and has now gained:

  • full integration with our bespoke SQL profiler, which is now also included
    • basically, this is a custom ADO.NET DbConnection that you wrap around your existing connection, and it adds logging
  • an awesome UI (rather than html comments), including a much clearer timeline
  • full support for AJAX activity
  • some very basic highlighting of duplicated queries, etc
  • webform support
  • and a ton of other features and enhancements

To illustrate with Jarrod’s image from the project page:

miniprofiler

The custom connection has been exercised extensively with dapper-dot-net, LINQ-to-SQL and direct ADO.NET, but should also work with Entity Framework (via ObjectContextUtils, provided) and hopefully any other DB frameworks built on top of ADO.NET.

We use it constantly. It is perhaps our primary tool in both understanding problems and just keeping a constant eye on the system while we use it – since this is running (for our developers) constantly, 24×7.

All too often such fine-grain profiling is just “there’s a problem, ask a DBA to attach a profiler to the production server for 2 minutes while I validate something”.

Enjoy.

http://code.google.com/p/mvc-mini-profiler/