trakr

trakr

trakr is a minimal library for tracking performance in Javascript applications in Node or in the browser. A sibling library, trakkr, exists to extend trakr with functionality around formatting/displaying outout and aggregation.

API

• Tracer: Can be used to enable or disable trace event collection in Node programatically. If tracing is enabled through trakr's TRACER, created Timer objects will record trace events by default. If trace event collection is enabled via a flag (eg. 'node ---trace-event-categories node.perf') or through chrome://tracing on Web, Timer needs to be explicitly told to create trace events (see below).

  import {TRACER, Timer} from 'trakr';
  
  TRACER.enable(); // enables 'node.perf' category by default
  const timer = Timer.create();
  // create a 'foo' section in the trace event timeline as well as recording
  timer.time('foo')(foo());
  

• Tracker: Can be used to count occurences of specific events or add values to arbitrary distributions. Currently, trakr offers bounded and unbounded options for tracking distributions - if a Buffer is passed in the Tracker will use only the memory it is provided to record its values (plus additional memory for each key), otherwise trakr will record every value add-ed to it. In the future, trakr may provide a sampled option (eg. utilizing reservoir sampling), but currently prioritizes 100% accurate data with the lowest possible CPU cost for local benchmarking purposes.

  If using the bounded option (recommended for performance to avoid allocations/GC due to array resizing during benchmarking), allocate enough space in the provide Buffer to handle 9 bytes of buffer space for each added value (1 byte for a tag and 8 bytes for the float value).

  import {Tracker} from 'trakr';
  
  const tracker = Tracker.create({buf: Buffer.alloc(1024)});
  tracker.count('foo');
  tracker.count('foo', 5);
  console.log(tracker.counters.foo); // => 6
  
  tracker.add('bar', 10);
  tracker.add('bar', 20);
  console.log(tracker.stats().get('bar').avg) // => 15
  

• Timer: Similar to Tracker, Timer allows for not only keeping track of various counts, but also for being able to time various sections of code. The Timer can be bounded or unbounded like with Tracker, and can also be configured to create trace events or not (see Tracer). The Timer aims to add minimal overhead to the code it is measuring - until it is start-ed (or after stop is called), it will do nothing, and by providing a preallocated Buffer, minimal memory churn should occur to skew the benchmarks. However minimal, the overhead added by the Timer is real, so care should be taken before reading too much into the results of small, frequently called functions which have been instrumented. Enabling tracing ({trace: true}) increases the overhead dramatically (writing to the Performance timing buffer and allocating strings for the section marks and names are expensive for frequent operations) - the stats from a tracing-enabled run are expected to diverge considerably from the actual performance.

  import {Timer} from 'trakr';
  
  const timer = Timer.create();
  const end = timer.time('foo');
  ...
  end(); // time between `time` call and now
  
  const t = timer.time('bar');
  t(bar()); // time between `time` call and when `bar` completes
  
  const t2 = timer.time('baz');
  baz().finally(t2); // time between `time` call and when a Promise resolves
  

• Stats: Helper class used by Tracker and Timer to compute the statistics for their stats method, but also generally useful for computing basic statistical information about the elements of an array.

License

trakr is distributed under the terms of the MIT License.