Yesterday, I wrote a quick and dirty ASP.NET HttpModule for displaying the time that a request takes to process. Note that by turning on trace output for a page, you can get timing information for that page. But as far as I understand, and I need to double check this, this only applies to the page lifecycle, which might not have all the information you want in the context of ASP.NET MVC.

Not to mention, I just wanted to see a simple number at the end of the page and not have to wade through all that trace output. Also keep in mind that this number only applies to the time spent in the ASP.NET pipeline. It obviously doesn’t tell you the full time of the request from browser sending the request to the browser rendering the response. For that I would use something like Firebug in Firefox.

Here’s the code for the module. Note that it only works from local requests in Debug mode. That’s a safety precaution so that if someone accidentally deploys this to a production machine, they won’t see this number at the bottom.

using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Web;

public class TimingModule : IHttpModule {
  public void Dispose() {
  }

  public void Init(HttpApplication context) {
    context.BeginRequest += OnBeginRequest;
    context.EndRequest += OnEndRequest;
  }

  void OnBeginRequest(object sender, System.EventArgs e) {
    if (HttpContext.Current.Request.IsLocal 
        && HttpContext.Current.IsDebuggingEnabled) {
      var stopwatch = new Stopwatch();
      HttpContext.Current.Items["Stopwatch"] = stopwatch;
      stopwatch.Start();
    }
  }

  void OnEndRequest(object sender, System.EventArgs e) {
    if (HttpContext.Current.Request.IsLocal 
        && HttpContext.Current.IsDebuggingEnabled) {
      Stopwatch stopwatch = 
        (Stopwatch)HttpContext.Current.Items["Stopwatch"];
      stopwatch.Stop();

      TimeSpan ts = stopwatch.Elapsed;
      string elapsedTime = String.Format("{0}ms", ts.TotalMilliseconds);

      HttpContext.Current.Response.Write("<p>" + elapsedTime + "</p>");
    }
  }
}

Notice that I made use of the System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch class, which provides more accuracy than simply calling taking the difference between two calls to DateTime.Now.

In my web.config, I just needed to add the following to the httpModules section (replacing Namespace and AssemblyName with their appropriate values):

<httpModules>
  <!-- ...other modules... -->
  <add name="TimingModule" type="Namespace.TimingModule, AssemblyName" />
</httpModules>

For IIS 7, this configuration would go in the <modules /> section.

Lastly, don’t forget to set your website to debug mode by adding the following in your Web.config. If you want to test your perf in release mode, just remove the IsDebuggingEnabled clause in the module and you don’t need to make the following change.

<compilation debug="true">
<!-- ... -->
</compilation>

Hope you find this useful.