Comments on: Firebug Surprise

By: Casey Wise

Casey Wise — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:20:52 +0000

Nice article, thank you for writing this. I had no idea you could profile your scripts! I made the transition from 1.0 to 2.0 (if there is such a thing) in the past 18 months and my coding life couldn’t be the way it is without FireBug. It’s memory leaks and sluggishness tick me off, but it’s worth it! Between jQuery and FireBug my code looks completely different from even a year ago an today. Thanks Joe for the great extension, it’s on every FireFox installation an all of my computers.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 20:49:45 +0000

Hi Eric,

Sorry you are right Rytmis does mean a stack trace. It would definitely help if the profiler had a stack trace, especially when you are using a framework like Prototype. I constantly use Prototype and how to compare whats faster, my functions or Prototype’s.

Daniel

By: Eric Wendelin

Eric Wendelin — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 16:35:03 +0000

Addendum to that last comment:

YSlow also fixes a bug in Firebug that causes Firebug to think a resource was not cached when it in fact was retrieved from the cache.

By: Eric Wendelin

Eric Wendelin — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 16:31:50 +0000

YSlow actually has better than basic profiling. I can also tell you the average load time of things and of course how many files a user’s browser would grab. There are some other modes you might consider checking out.

By: martin

martin — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 11:28:30 +0000

I think you misunderstood his usage of the term ‘graph’.

He doesnt mean a pretty chart, he means a stack trace so you can see who called who.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 10:18:10 +0000

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the comments!

@Rytmis - I don’t think a graph would be more accurate. A table shows you an easy comparison between lots of different variables. While a graph is easier to read but lacks in the detail. Although a graph would look nice in Firebug!

@Eric - I have tried the YSlow Extension but I don’t really find it useful. It just rates things A-F and gives you no numerical representation of the results it finds.

@ms - There are loads of screenshots on the Firebug website, but I will add on on here.

@Mathieu - Venkman is horrible, I’m so glad Firebug came about to replace it. Have you ever noticed that Venkam runs the profiler on all the FireFox extension scripts as well?

Daniel

By: Mathieu Carrier

Mathieu Carrier — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 02:51:06 +0000

Firebug is really a great tool. I mean, how many times did I hope for breakpoints when debugging Javascript code only to find out that Firebug had them all along under the “Scripts” button. Oh well, Venkman has them too but it isn’t as nicely integrated as Firebug!

Cheers to the Firebug — Joe — team!

By: ms

ms — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 01:47:12 +0000

screenshot would be nice.

By: Eric Wendelin

Eric Wendelin — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:41:43 +0000

Profiling and performance gets even better with the YSlow extension. I highly recommend it.

By: Rytmis

Rytmis — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 07:37:01 +0000

Just one problem though: you don’t get a call graph, so there’s no easy way to tell why fooMunge() is being called fourty thousand times. Course you *can* find it out by starting from the function that takes the longest time (likely to be your entry point to the slow operation) and working down from there. But a call graph would be a lot easier to read.