The average ASP.NET/SQL Server developer has a number of excellent, freely available tools for performance tracking, such as:

• PerfMon for monitoring server utilisation,
• Fiddler for measuring and tuning bandwidth utilisation
• and of course, IIS log statistics for tracking the most requested files for your site.

All performance tracking tools have strengths and limitations. Unlike most freely available performance tuning tools, CrunchyCode has built in statistical tracking allowing developers and system engineers to measure the user perceived "time to load" of each webpage in your live environment.

User perceived time to load is defined (in CrunchyCode) as the elasped time from when the user clicks on a hyperlink , to when the onload() event of the requested page is fired. (We refer here to the DOM body element's onLoad() event, in Javascript, not the Page_Load() event in ASP.NET).

This approach differs from most web performance tracking measurements (which are normally entirely server side). Server side measurements fail to recognise the impact of network speeds and utilisation during peak times, usage patterns and Dynamic HTML features (which fire on page load) which can cause a page to render more slowly from the user's perspective.

Perhaps the best thing is that you get this performance tracking for free. Almost every application template shipped with CrunchyCode has built in performance tracking. NB: The Macromedia Flash application templates do not currently have the performance tracker built in. It's considerably more complex to measure load times as Flash developers have quite fine tuned control over content download. Many Flash applications are downloaded to the client in "gulps", spaced out over the timeline.

CrunchyCode does not currently give you a breakdown of the pipeline, which would definitely be useful in identifying bottlenecks.

The key points to note on utilising the built in performance tracking are listed below:

• All statistics are stored in the automatically created PerformanceStats table.
• This table is populating by the automatically created InsertPerformanceStats stored procedure.
• If your application already has a table (or any other object) called PerformanceStats, you will have to customise the InsertPerformanceStats stored procedure.
• There are two times recorded by CrunchyCode, the Start Time and End Time.
• The Start Time is recorded when the user clicks on a hyperlink in the auto-generated application menu.
• If you would like to utilise CrunchyCode performance tracking in your own webpages, simply use the launchURL() javascript function to record Start Times. (For examples of how this function is invoked, it's probably best to simply view the source for a CrunchyCode menu).
• The Finish time is recorded by invoking the ASP.NET function LogPerformance. This is defined in the file crunchycode/vb/logPerformance.vb.
  
  Sample usage:
  
  <script runat="server" src="crunchycode/vb/logPerformance.vb"></script>
  <% LogPerformance %>
  
• CrunchyCode records the user and page they requested, so you can also use the PerformanceStats table to determine which pages in your website are the most popular, as well as which take the longest to load.