Stack Exchange Website Profiler Now Open Source

ScuttleMonkey writes "Joel Spolsky sent out smoke signals this morning about the recent release of the Stack Exchange Website Profiler as open source. Sam Saffron expounds on why this profiler is perhaps 'best and most comprehensive production web page profiler out there for any web platform.' The project is available via Google Code or NuGet."

Comments

.NET production profiler

[yincrash]

To be a little bit more informative is a low profile monitoring tool for production environments running .NET mvc.

Re:.NET production profiler

[j-pimp]

Awesome, open source code that requires you to use a closed source system to run it. That always makes me laugh.

Are you running on pure open hardware? is all the microcode on all your firmware devices open source?

You have a piece of software that can be integrated in a .NET web app to gain more visibility into how the app functions. Having that available is a good thing if you write .NET code. Having the source code available is a potentially better thing for you (I say potentially because I'm speaking of immediate and direct utility). The fact that .NET itself is not open source, and that windows itself is not open source does not nullify the utility of access to the source code for this profiler.

Re:.NET production profiler

[just_another_sean]

You (and the blog you linked to) seem to have a different definition of open source then most of us...

From your link:

Reference License

The .NET Framework source is being released under a read-only reference license.

*emphasis mine

And as for Mono, my understanding is that they specifically avoided touching the reference code so the that Mono is considered a reversed engineered product and that no developers were tainted by being given access to the MS code.

Re:.NET production profiler

[shutdown -p now]

Real only license,

I'm not sure what a "Real only license" is, so I assume you meant to write "read-only".

Even then it doesn't make any sense to me, because Mono is GPL and LGPL, and ASP.NET MVC is under Ms-PL; the latter is considered a "free software license" by FSF (it's effectively BSDL + patent clause). Neither are "read-only" in any meaningful sense.

in the real world people include lots of closed source stuff when using it.

In real world, most people who use Linux also use proprietary closed-source NVidia graphics drivers. That's because, in real world, most people are pragmatists and not fanatics.

Re:Lots of work to do...

[Rigbyd]

Sadly Joel Sprotsky the ex-Microsoftie still has a lot of work to do: choosing .NET and Windows server (!) was probably far from the smartest idea. All the biggest websites (eBay, Amazon, GMail, Google, Wikipedia, etc.) do NOT run on Windows servers for a reason.

Perhaps you should start by looking at how StackOverflow actually does it since a majority of their servers *aren't* Windows based. http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/3/stack-overflow-architecture-update-now-at-95-million-page-vi.html

any web platform?

[farnsworth]

'best and most comprehensive production web page profiler out there for any web platform.'

That's a little bit misleading. This project is basically instrumentation that you add to an asp.net 4.0 webapp. It does not seem to be usable by any other kind of webapp. It doesn't even look like it would be easy to port to the other major platforms.

FLOSS StackOverflow alternatives

[Hobart]

It is nice that these utilities are part of a growing amount of open source .NET code (like Apache's efforts helped grow F/LOSS software for Java). That said, those who want to support a Q&A community running on Free code can look at:

• * The Free Shapado package behind http://ask.debian.net/ (and their other sites)
• * The OSQA package behind http://lockergnome.net/ and others