Benchmarkable

Benchmarkable is a module that allows a class to mention which instance methods to benchmark, and then allows retrieving the benchmark report in csv format from the class's instances. The csv includes the method invocation timestamp, some context description (if provided), the method name along with arguments passed for the invocation, and the number of seconds the method took to execute.

Benchmarkable is available as a gem. Simply type the following:

gem install benchmarkable

Example:

class Gateway
  # ...
  def make_request(url)
    url = URI.parse(url)
    Net::HTTP.start(url.host, url.port) { |http| http.get('/index.html') }
  rescue => error
    puts "Unexpected error: #{error.message}"
  end
  # ...
 
  include Benchmarkable
  benchmark :make_request
end
 
gateway = Gateway.new
gateway.make_request('http://www.google.com/')
gateway.make_request('http://www.yahoo.com/')
gateway.make_request('http://www.wikyblog.com/AmanKing/')
File.open('./gateway_performance_report.csv', 'a+') do |file|
  file.puts gateway.benchmark_report.to_csv(:starting_context => 'gateway')
end

Output (in gateway_performance_report.csv):

"2009-09-10T20:13:59+05:30","gateway","make_request http://www.google.com/","2.306514978408813"
"2009-09-10T20:13:59+05:30","gateway","make_request http://www.yahoo.com/","2.08063411712646"
"2009-09-10T20:14:00+05:30","gateway","make_request http://www.wikyblog.com/AmanKing/","5.1521680355072"

This can have interesting usages, one of them being monitoring AJAX performance of a web application by combining Benchmarkable with Selenium functional specs. I'll write in more details later but a sample is provided in the bitbucket repository: http://bitbucket.org/amanking/benchmarkable