Starfish Rocks!

Ray Camden recently released an initial version of his free Starfish debugger. This is the first product that I have tried that really provides the information that you need to get detailed performance information on your ColdFusion applications.

I tried it because we were having performance problems on an application that I have been working on. The information provided by the ColdFusion debugging provides a great deal of detailed performance information. Unfortunately, it provides that information only on a per-page basis - which is difficult to aggregate and use to find performance problems that crop up over time.

The logging provided in the ColdFusion administrator will report long-running pages, but it won't provide more detailed information about which routines and queries.

Starfish provides all of the information available in the debugging aggregated over multiple requests and does so from the convenience of the ColdFusion administrator.

The information is easy to sort and provides information about how long templates take to run as well as CFC methods (distinguished by values passed in as arguments) as well as queries (also distinguished by the contents of the SQL).

As a version 0 product, you might expect that it would have some bugs. So far, I haven't found any that are major. The units of measurement aren't consistent (seconds used for Min Time as milliseconds used for the other two). For the record, I prefer seconds. Either the "Template Time Data" doesn't work or I haven't figured it out. These are very small nits, however, and it runs much better than one should expect from version 0 software.

In just two days of use, I have found several small (and one fairly large) performance problems on the site and fixed them. I highly recommend you check it out.

Good Luck!

PS - Raymond, I hope you enjoy your new copy of Civilation IV.