Profiling your AJAX Applications using AjaxView

Don't know if this has already been discussed at length before, but I found an interesting little tool from Microsoft Research for profiling the Javascript functionality in your AJAX applications.

Its called AjaxView and can remotely monitor any AJAX web app that is currently on the web, locally or whatever.

You basically, install a small proxy application, then change your Internet Explorer LAN connection to go through a proxy of localhost:8888.

Go and browse your web application or your own AJAX app, and execute your normal series of functionality.

Once your done, you then browse to a page generated by the tool itself

http://fakeurl.com/?&AJAXVIEWREQUEST=GET=main.html

This gets you something like this:

You can then click on whatever item you want, typically the site that represents the worst performance. You'll then get something like this:

Here I have clicked on the 'Mean Time (ms)' view to get column sorted by the slowest functions. If I want to drill down a bit more, I can click on the 'Details' link which gives me:

This shows me a breakdown of which functions took how long.

Its actually a pretty quick way to get a good idea of what is consuming a lot of client side cycles from a Javascript perspective. The tool is a little raw and is still somewhat rough, but its easy enough to use and get going and worth a quick look.