Profiling real-world Node code is extremely difficult. It’s very hard to track which CPU cycles were used by what. Callbacks can execute in any order, and the call stack gets destroyed each time you have an async break in your code.

async-profile is a new Node CPU profiler that doesn’t have these problems. It’s the first of its kind, and tracks the flow of your code through continuations, callbacks and promises, and accurately counts how much CPU time is used where.

Features

In addition to tracking the total amount of time spent in each callback, async-profile summarizes key performance metrics of your code.

-- CODE language-plaintext --
$ coffee example.coffee
total: 1.823ms (in 2.213ms real time, CPU load: 0.81, wait time: 3.688ms)

• How much CPU time was used
• How much real time was used (as measured by a clock)
• How much of the time was spent using the CPU (The ratio of CPU time to real time)
• How much time callbacks spent waiting to run (High wait time is indicative either of slow external services, or callbacks blocking each other. Node is optimized for code where wait time is high and CPU time is low because waiting is free.)

Example

The main profiler output shows the tree of callbacks that run. They’re nested so the information about a callback is indented underneath the code that created it.

-- CODE language-plaintext --
start | length | created at
---------------------------------------------------------------------
0.879: 0.011ms    at Function.Project.fromCache (project.coffee:12:16)
1.668: 0.043ms        at Event.hash (event.coffee:238:16)
1.780: 0.064ms          at event.coffee:246:21
2.016: 0.364ms            at Object.exports.count (throttling.coffee:12:14)
2.506: 1.166ms                at throttleProjectEvent (throttling.coffee:132:14)
1.947: 0.002ms            at Object.exports.count (project.coffee:52:19)
1.593: 0.001ms        at Event.hash (event.coffee:238:16)
0.775: 0.003ms    at Function.Project.fromCache (project.coffee:13:20)

In this example, you can see that there’s one callback using almost all of our CPU time (the one that’s created at [CODE]throttleProjectEvent[/CODE] in [CODE]throttling.coffee:132[/CODE]). It’s using 1.166ms of synchronous CPU time! This is very bad because it’s blocking the entire Node process for that entire time.

Installation

async-profile gives you essential insight into the performance of your node.js programs, and can help you find and debug performance problems much more easily than with a traditional CPU profiler.

We’ve used it with great success to find performance problems in Bugsnag. And I’d strongly encourage you to [CODE]npm install async-profile[/CODE] and give it a go.

Let me know on Twitter if you have any questions or feedback.