New Release! Glimpse 0.17.5

[nikmd23]

Note: Glimpse 0.18.9 is now out. It offers even more web development productivity features.

Turning up the Signal

Hello all! The Glimpse team continues to make progress on Glimpse for Node, and today I'm happy to announce the release of 0.17.5. This release is focused on a major new feature: the Timeline Tab!

0.17.5 Timeline Tab

Glimpse's Timeline Tab is a request specific logical profiler. It works similarly to other CPU profilers you may have seen in the past, but instead of focusing on what physically happened with deep call stacks that tend to contain a lot of framework and runtime code noise, Glimpse's Timeline Tab reduces the noise and turns up the signal by providing a view that relates to the concepts in your app: middleware, service calls and database queries. It does all of this in an easy to understand waterfall chart.

Here's a few of my favorite bits in the Timeline Tab:

Zooming

The Timeline Tab fully supports zooming into a more specific portion of time for deeper inspection. Just drag one of the two handles.

Identify Performance Bottlenecks

While the Timeline Tab does its best to help you identify performance bottlenecks visually, we also wanted to be as explicit as possible about potential areas of interest.

To achieve that, we highlight the three slowest events, and allow you to click on them to jump directly to that event in the timeline.

Filtering

Glimpse's Timeline Tab automatically profiles the most common causes of performance issues: middleware processing, service calls (both server and client side) and database queries (currently MongoDB, support for other database engines coming soon). If you'd like to hone in on just a subset of the events, the filter bar allows you to do just that.

Full Stack

As with many of the other features in Glimpse, the Timeline Tab is Full Stack. It will show you XmlHttpRequests made from the browser, as well as any calls to console.error(). Further, Glimpse for Node 0.17.5 now supports the User Timing Specification, so any calls to performance.mark() or performance.measure() will appear in the Timeline as you'd expect.

Next Steps

There's a lot to explore with the Timeline Tab, and we think that you'll find it indispensable for tracking down nagging performance problems.

Glimpse for Node 0.17.5 is available from our private NPM feed right now. Just follow the installation instructions in our Readme to get started.

We hope you love this version of Glimpse. If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to open an issue!