One thing I have rarely done is debug Node-Red as a process (for normal stuff node.warn, console.log and util.inspect are usually sufficient), . A quick google brought these up:
I've only done it with the raw chrome debugger...
If process debugging approaches options are not well documented, then this could be a good thing to do.
One could imagine instrumenting function nodes and NR internals (clone, messaging, debug output, etc), and making a kind of 'task manager' style performance display to help tune flow performance; but in general I find projects which are over instrumented in this way annoying because I just think of the performance I'm losing because of the instrumentation!
(and apologies if I'm not aware of developments after 0.17)
There may also be mileage in investigating:
Maybe the internal profiler can be turned on and off in real time, and the data captured for analysis - you could image a flow to do this and display on dashboard 
?
Note also that @BartButenaers has a number of nodes relating to performance analysis. We used some of these when looking at OpenCV related topics.
