Time Bandits is a plugin which enhances Rails’ controller/view/db benchmark logging.
Without configuration, the standard Rails ‘Completed line’ will change from its default format
Completed in 56ms (View: 28, DB: 5) | 200 OK [http://127.0.0.1/jobs/info]
to:
Completed in 56.278ms (View: 28.488, DB: 5.111(2,0)) | 200 OK [http://127.0.0.1/jobs/info]
Here “DB: 5.111(2,0)” means that 2 DB queries were executed and there were 0 SQL query cache hits.
However, non-trivial applications also rather often use external services, which consume time that adds to your total response time, and sometimes these external services are not under your control. In these cases, it’s very helpful to have an entry in your log file that records the time spent in the exterrnal service (so that you can prove that it wasn’t your rails app that slowed down during your slashdotting, for example ;-).
Additional TimeConsumers can be added to the log using the “Timebandits.add” method.
Example:
TimeBandits.add TimeBandits::TimeConsumers::Memcached TimeBandits.add TimeBandits::TimeConsumers::GarbageCollection.instance if GC.respond_to? :enable_stats
Here we’ve added two additional consumers, which are already provided with the plugin. (Note that GC information requires a patched ruby, (e.g. github.com/skaes/matzruby, branch ruby187pl202patched or Ruby Enterprise Edition).
With these two new time consumers, the log line changes to
Completed in 680.378ms (View: 28.488, DB: 5.111(2,0), MC: 5.382(6r,0m), GC: 120.100(1), HP: 0(2000000,546468,18682541,934967)) | 200 OK [http://127.0.0.1/jobs/info]
“MC: 5.382(6r,0m)” means that 6 memcache reads were performed and all keys were found in the cache (0 misses).
“GC: 120.100(1)” tells us that 1 garbage collection was triggered during the request, taking 120.100 milliseconds.
“HP: 0(2000000,546468,18682541,934967)” shows statistics on heap usage. The format is g(s,a,m,l), where
g: heap growth during the request (#slots) s: size of the heap after request processing was completed (#slots) a: number of object allocations during the request (#slots) m: number of bytes allocated by the ruby x_malloc call (#bytes) l: live data set size after last GC (#slots)
It’s pretty easy to write additional time consumers; please refer to the source code.
Rails 2.3.2, 2.3.3 or 2.3.4 The plugin will raise an error if you try to use it with a different version.
A ruby with the railsbench GC patches applied, if you want to include GC and heap size information in the completed line. This is very useful, especially if you want to analyze your rails logs using logjam (see github.com/alpinegizmo/logjam/).
This plugin started from the code of the ‘custom_benchmark’ plugin written by tylerkovacs. However, we changed so much of the code that is is practically a full rewrite, hence we changed the name.
Copyright © 2009 Stefan Kaes <[email protected]>
Some portions Copyright © 2008 tylerkovacs
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