Question

I have a WCF REST Web Service (.NET 4) which is design based on multitier architecture (i.e. presentation, logic, data access, etc.). At runtime and without instrumentation, I would like to measure how much time a single request takes for each layer (e.g. Presentation = 2 ms, Logic = 50 ms, Data = 250 ms).

Considering that I cannot change the method signature to pass in a StopWatch (or anything similar), how would you accomplish such thing?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you cannot add code to your solution, you will end up using profilers to examine what the code is doing, but I would only suggest that in an environment other than production unless you are only having issues in performance. There are plenty of ways to set up another environment and profile under load.

Profilers will hook into your code and examine how long each method takes. There is no “this is the business layer performance” magic, as the profiler realizes physical boundaries (class, method) instead of logical boundaries, but you can examine the output and determine speed.

If you can touch code there are other options you can add which can be turned on and off via configuration. Since you have stated you cannot change code, I would imagine this is a non-option.