Firebug’s console.time!

This post is directly related to the previous post where I explain how to use the Firebug’s console object and in that case its time method. That is really powerful and gives the opportunity to track the performance of a sample JavaScript chunk of code. What it does not do is to give you a more detailed profile of that particular JS code.

That’s because the console’s profile method works on functions and if you’d like to profile a loop it will give you there’s nothing to be profiled. One workaround to that is to use closures.

JavaScript closures

A JavaScript closure is to make an anonymous function and to put the code in it, like so:

(function() {
 for (var i = 100000; i--; ) {
  var a = new Array();
 }
})();

Firebug’s console.profile()

That code can be than wrapped with both console.profile() and console.profileEnd() in something like:

console.profile('my profile');
(function() {
 for ( var i = 100000; i--; ) {
  var a  = new Array();
 }
})();
console.profileEnd('my profile');

That will give a more precise measurement like that one shown on the picture bellow: