Ask HN: I've built a front/back end performance profiler, is there a market?
I've developed a tool for doing multi-system profiling for web apps. You've got some JS code for the front-end of your app, some PHP/Python/Ruby/whatever on the back-end, and a database or two that actually store content. Maybe you've got a more elaborate setup (async task queues, a NoSQL document database, whatever). Your application isn't fast enough, and you're not sure how to speed it up.
The tools I've developed help solve this problem. There's a Firefox plugin and a number of backend plugins that do performance tracing and aggregate it all together. For a given user action, you can see how long everything involved took to serve it: which HTTP requests happened, which Javascript code executed, and which backend code executed, which database queries executed, etc. Once you've profiled it, you can drill down into the specific slow parts to figure out what to fix.
I've used it on a few open source projects to prove to myself that it works and I'm just getting ready to do a few case studies with local companies to demonstrate that it's actually industrially useful.
Right now it's not sufficiently polished to sell as a product, but it's good enough that I can consult with it: bring me in for a few days, I'll sit down with your team and help identify and fix the most significant bottlenecks in your application.
So here's my question for HN: Do you think there's a market for performance consulting like this?