As a developer I’m very often on the hunt for every last bit of performance – trying to optimize every single function of my program.
In the past weeks I’ve been thinking of, designing and developing on a new plugin for the growing framework Grails. It will be called GInstruments and it aims to provide some useful clues for Grails developers who want to know how their application is performing.
The plugin uses Hyperic’s (now SpringSource) SIGAR (System Information Gatherer And Reporter) to report vital system information such as CPU usage or memory comsumption overall or for the current process.
The first release (0.1) is only going to be a snapshot of my first ideas, hence I’ll not release it to the official Grails plugin repositories. It will show you some information about your system like name, version, vendor or architecture, the current CPU and memory consumption. Especially for your current process (which will be the relevant information to know). Take a look at this:
First draft of GInstruments 0.1
All these features are subject to change (I first wanted to know whether there could be a future for this). Possible features for the future may include
- logging of metrics (cpu, memory, swap, network, …)
- tracking of Grails events (requests, …)
- visualization of these two and more components over time to detect points of interest
I’m open to all kinds feature requests but please bear in mind that I’m only doing this in my spare time, after work, school whatsoever ;-)
At last let me point you to a link (for the non-Apple-developers) to how Apple’s Instruments-app looks like. I think it has some other cool possibilities.
At the moment I’m also waiting for some response from the guys from Hyperic. I really want to license the plugin under the terms of the Apache License (the license Grails uses and many other plugins) – SIGAR is GPL-only at the moment.
Do you think this could be a useful plugin for the Grails infrastructure? What’s your opinion.
