Calculating page request times for your web application

It has been 3 weeks since I started developing jobBoard, a web application for online recruitment/jobs database. Time now for some performance numbers!

How do you accurately measure the processing time it takes for each request on your web application? An example,

• User clicks on a link on a page
• Request goes through a couple of servlet filters, e.g acegi, sitemesh filters
• The corresponding controllers/actions process the request, calls DAOs
• DAOs/ORMs queries the native database system and returns results to controller
• Controller gets results from DAOs and puts request attributes to JSP/Velocity etc. page template
• Page served up by the web server.

There's a good article on servlet filters with an example just to do the above. However, I needed to present the process time on the requested web page but once the filter chain is executed, I can't put the execution time as a request attribute to be used by the page template. But here's a neat trick.

Put the 'before' time into the request attribute,

public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain) throws IOException, ServletException {

  long before = System.currentTimeMillis();
  request.setAttribute("before", before); // add here
  chain.doFilter(request, response); 
  long after = System.currentTimeMillis();

Then in my JSP page,

Request processed in <%= System.currentTimeMillis() - Long.valueOf(pageContext.getRequest().getAttribute("before").toString()) %> ms

The values are the same as when using the example TimeFilter as it is

.