change markers

[toneplex]

When making changes during profiling, it would be very nice to add a marker, so that you can easily see the distinction between a change and the previous state. The marker would simple be a vertical line in the graph, so that you could see how effective your changes were.

One possible way of doing this, would be to add an additional parameter to the _profile=1&_xhchange=1 query string, so that you don't have to click a button in the UI.

Now, if you wanted to label the change, maybe a the xhchange param could be a string with a label.

[markstory]

Would having a way to persist when things changed be useful? Like settings deployment times?

[toneplex]

In a production environment, having deployment times would be great. For my purpose, it would make development a lot easier, to quickly see what effect a change has had.

For instance, I'm working on the home page rendering speed, so I refresh a few times to get a baseline, then I refactor a method to implement caching, or some other efficiency and refresh a few more times. Having that change marker, would quickly allow me to see the affects of that refactoring.

[markstory]

So how would you like to add the deploy times? Through special URL parameters on the page being profiled or a separate page in xhgui where you can add in deploy times/change markers with notes?

[datr]

Ideally both but I think the latter would be more useful at first. For example I might forget to set the parameter in the first system but at least in the second system I could go back and correct for that.

The first system could also make use of the second system as an api of sorts if it were to be added later on.

Eventually such an api could tie into a version control system and this could all happen automatically but that's very pie in the sky.

[toneplex]

I would say it depends on how you make use of the change markers.

In development, it would be much easier to just have a query param that you add as you refresh the page and test out your changes.

In production I would see more of an admin page where you could record deployments via your deployment system. Of course this would be easier done as an API call from Jenkins, etc.

[patrick-radius]

I was thinking about something like this too... the ability to label or tag a specific request would be really usefull...