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Instrument your AJAX apps using AJAXView to profile performance in the browser

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I just came across AJAXView which is a dev tool from Microsoft Research aimed at giving developers visibility into how their web apps perform in end-user's browsers.

The important thing to note is that you do not need to modify the web-app code or the client-side browser. Basically what it does is to insert server-side proxy which automatically inserts instrumentation code into the web application's Javascript as it is being sent to the browser. This instrumentation provides visibility into the application's performance, behaviour and critical state, while the on-the-fly instrumentation allows AjaxView to serve different instrumentation across users and over time. That's how it gathers the information, but like most performance profiling tools the crux is in how the information is presented so that you can actually make sense of it. AJAXView seems to do a pretty good job, presenting a URL-based view which you can drill down into to examine the javascript functions defined there, along with associated statistics.

It looks pretty neat. You can follow a complete walkthrough of AJAXView, covering how to set it up and how it works.

Or you can watch a video from MIX07 on AJAXView.

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