Rotunda: The Microsoft profiler for Web applications

Microsoft Research is working on a project named Rotunda to deliver a profiler for Web applications. A profiler is a performance analysis tool that measures the behavior of a program as it is running, particularly the frequency and duration of function calls.

Profiling enables developers to learn where their program spends time and which functions call which other functions while the program executes. This enables developers to optimize the performance of their applications, so they can profile create more efficient, higher performing applications for the Web tier.

Ben Livshits, the Microsoft researcher leading the Rotunda effort, said the goal of the project is to be able to profile the performance of a Web application from the time a user clicks on a link and triggers an event in the browser—which triggers a database lookup—through each point of the resolution of the transaction.