Conditional profiling

[alxgsv]

Useful in cases like:

profile.profile_if(Rails.env.staging?, ...) { ... }

profile.profile_if(current_user.admin?, ...) { ... }

[lmarburger]

I like the idea but I'm not too fond of the API. Since this is Ruby, you'll want a #profile_unless method. This would also be useful with #profile_files_matching which means #profile_files_matching_if and #profile_files_matching_unless methods.

Do you have some code where this change makes your life easier? Pilfer::Middleware does something similar. It's effectively:

def run
  if should_profile?
    profiler.profile(&method(:call_downstream))
  else
    call_downstream
  end
end

[alxgsv]

Yes, I use it (that's why I made it). If you don't like it — okay, it's just idea that helps me :-)

It's true about unless and profile_files_matching_if. I think I just want some global flag that indicates that profiling should be turned on. With that we can have it conditionally turned on if before_filters.

[danthompson]

Just my two cents, but I don't care for the API either. 😕

I suppose my major concern would be with the duplication of language-provided constructs as methods. Also, if you have criteria that determines if and when profiling runs, I believe that shouldn't be the profilers concern.

Perhaps, wrapping the profiler with your logic and conditions would be a clearer approach like @lmarburger illustrates.

[eric]

The vision that I've had is that the user of pilfer would have an entirely different class that would be responsible for deciding if a given call should be profiled or not.

Something that I think would be really cool is if it were possible to signal to a given process to profile on demand, but I don't think that sort of logic makes sense to be in pilfer itself right now.