Making it easy to work with performance

We’ve been working with performance in our REST API a while back. We’ve been considering different options for measuring our API in production, but we had an idea to use the design of the API itself to handle the measuring.

Part of the inspiration came from the Changlelog’s coverage of CodeConf and Coda Hale’s Metrics talk. (Slides).

Using our pipeline approach to constructing a REST-API with conventions, we added a pipe that starts a stopwatch and stops it when the request is finished. Then we can log statistics for each individual part of the API, closely coupled with the code that is executed for that particular request. I pitched the idea to my good colleague Johan Andersson, and he did a fantastic job at implementing the solution!

The output looks something like this:

This allows us to see how our API is performing in production, and where we need to focus our optimization efforts to make the API go faster. We can even add some flags to the request to get more detailed output.