Performance Profiling for Open OnDemand

[Oglopf]

I'd like to add a profiling tool to the project to start making progress on some performance issues.

The easiest profiler I've used with rails was the rack-mini-profiler which seems like a good candidate.

Then we could make some progress on issues like the current design of how we populate nav items discussed here:
#210

My suggestion would be to place this in the development block of the dashboard's Gemfile, that way developers will have access to the profiler to watch how their code is affecting OOD performance.

[Oglopf]

Some information from rack-mini-profiler that has already been interesting is to see that on a fresh load of the app, all the icons are retrieved from the respective apps, which is easily causing the biggest hits on the first load or on a restart.

After that, the next longest piece looks to be the _group_items.html.erb file and its logic:

What I'd like to try and figure out is if there is some way to first retrieve those icons in a more efficient way (is the code that is fetching them doing side effects I'm unaware of such as useless validations, etc).

Looking at Eric's suggestions, I'm not sure why the title and description are being mentioned, but I could be misunderstanding. The bigger issue to me seems to be the icons. Either way, both these things can come from the manifest file, yet he mentions the form.yml.erb (which also confuses me) as what is being processed. I think the idea of there being a separate hash used by may put together by a factory method may work though.