What Are Some Good NET Profilers

Question

What profilers have you used when working with  net programs  and which would you particularly recommend

User · Answer

I ve been testing Telerik s JustTrace recently and although it is well away from a finished product the guys are going in the right direction

User · Answer

We selected YourKit Profiler for  NET in my company as it was the best value  price vs  feature   For a small company that wants to have flexible licensing  floating licenses  it was a perfect choice - ANTS was developer seat locket at the time   Also  it provided us with the ability to attach to the running process which was not possible with dotTrace  Beware though that attaching is not the best option as everything  NET will slow down  but this was the only way to profile  NET applications started by other processes  Feature wise  ANTS and dotTrace were better - but in the end YourKit was good enough

User · Answer

I doubt that the profiler which comes with Visual Studio Team System is the best profiler  but I have found it to be good enough on many occasions  What specifically do you need beyond what VS offers   EDIT  Unfortunately it is only available in VS Team System  but if you have access to that it is worth checking out

User · Answer

Don t forget nProf - a prefectly good  freeware profiler

User · Answer

I have used JetBrains dotTrace and Redgate ANTS extensively  They are fairly similar in features and price  They both offer useful performance profiling and quite basic memory profiling   dotTrace integrates with Resharper  which is really convenient  as you can profile the performance of a unit test with one click from the IDE  However  dotTrace often seems to give spurious results  e g  saying that a method took several years to run   I prefer the way that ANTS presents the profiling results  It shows you the source code and to the left of each line tells you how long it took to run  dotTrace just has a tree view   EQATEC profiler is quite basic and requires you to compile special instrumented versions of your assemblies which can then be run in the EQATEC profiler  It is  however  free   Overall I prefer ANTS for performance profiling  although if you use Resharper then the integration of dotTrace is a killer feature and means it beats ANTS in usability   The free Microsoft CLR Profiler   Net framework 2 0    Net Framework 4 0  is all you need for  NET memory profiling   2011 Update   The Scitech memory profiler has quite a basic UI but lots of useful information  including some information on unmanaged memory which dotTrace and ANTS lack - you might find it useful if you are doing COM interop  but I have yet to find any profiler that makes COM memory issues easy to diagnose - you usually have to break out windbg exe   The ANTS profiler has come on in leaps and bounds in the last few years  and its memory profiler has some truly useful features which now pushed it ahead of dotTrace as a package in my estimation  I m lucky enough to have licenses for both  but if you are going to buy one  Net profiler for both performance and memory  make it ANTS

User · Answer

Full Disclosure   While not yet as full-featured as some of the other  NET memory profilers listed here  there is a new entry on the market called JustTrace  It s made by Telerik and it s primary goal is to make tracing profiling easier and faster to do for all types of apps  web Silverlight desktop    If you ve ever found profiling and optimization intimidating or slow with other tools  then JustTrace might be worth a look

User · Answer

The latest version of ANTS memory profiler  I think it s 5  simply rocks    I was haunting a leak using WinDbg and SOS since it proved to be the best way before  then I tried ANTS and I got it in minutes  Really a wonderful piece of software

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If you re on ASP NET MVC  you can try MVCMiniProfiler  http   benjii me 2011 07 using-the-mvc-mini-profiler-with-entity-framework

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I ve been working with JetBrains dotTrace for WinForms and Console Apps  not tested on ASP net yet   and it works quite well   They recently also added a  Personal License  that is significantly cheaper than the corporate one  Still  if anyone else knows some cheaper or even free ones  I d like to hear as well  -

User · Answer

AutomatedQA AQTime for timing and SciTech MemProfiler for memory

User · Answer

Intel    VTune    Performance Analyzer  for quick sampling

User · Answer

I ve found plenty of problems in a big C  app using this   Usually the problem occurs during startup or shutdown as plugins are being loaded  and big data structures are being created  destroyed  serialized  or deserialized  Often they are created and initialized more than once  and change handlers get added multiple times  further compounding the problem   In cases like this  the program can be so sluggish that only 2 samples are sufficient to pinpoint the guilty method   function   property call sites

User · Answer

AQTime is reasonable  but has a bit of a learning curve and isn t as easy to use as the built in one in Team Suite

User · Answer

For me SpeedTrace is the best tool on the market because it does not only help you to find bottlenecks inside your applications  It also helps you in troubleshooting scenarios to find out why your application was crashing  your setup did not install  your application hung up  your application performance is sometimes poor depending on the data input  e g  to identify slow db transactions

User · Answer

I would like to add yourkit java and  net profiler  I love it for Java  haven t tried  NET version though

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Unfortunate most of the profilers I tried failed when used with tail calls  most notably ANTS  I just end up writing my own   There is a simple implementation on CodeProject that you can use as a base

User · Answer

If you re looking for something quick  easy  and free  http   code google com p slimtune  seems to do the job fine

User · Answer

Haven t tried it myself  but maybe dotTrace  Their ReSharper application is certainly a good one  Maybe dotTrace is too

User · Answer

I have found dotTrace Profiler by JetBrains to be an excellent profiling tool for  NET and their ASP NET mode is quality

User · Answer

Others have covered performance profiling  but with regards to memory profiling  I m currently evaluating both the Scitech  NET Memory Profiler 3 1 and ANTS Memory Profiler 5 1  current versions as of September 2009   I tried the JetBrains one a year or two ago and it wasn t as good as ANTS  for memory profiling  so I haven t bothered this time  From reading the web sites it looks like it doesn t have the same memory profiling features as the other two   Both ANTS and the Scitech memory profiler have features that the other doesn t  so which is best will depend upon your preferences  Generally speaking  the Scitech one provides more detailed information while the ANTS one is really incredible at identifying the leaking object  Overall  I prefer the ANTS one because it is so quick at identifying possible leaks   Here are the main the pros and cons of each from my experience   Common Features of ANTS and Scitech  NET Memory Profiler   Real-time analysis feature Excellent how-to videos on their web sites Easy to use Reasonably performant  obviously slower than without the profiler attached  but not so much you become frustrated  Show instances of leaking objects Basically they both do the job pretty well   ANTS   One-click filters to find common leaks including  objects kept alive only by event handlers  objects that are disposed but still live and objects that are only being kept alive by a reference from a disposed object  This is probably the killer feature of ANTS - finding leaks is incredibly fast because of this  In my experience  the majority of leaks are caused by event handlers not being unhooked and ANTS just takes you straight to these objects  Awesome  Object retention graph  While the same info is available in Scitech  it s much easier to interpret in ANTS  Shows size with children in addition to size of the object itself  but only when an instance is selected unfortunately  not in the overall class list   Better integration to Visual Studio  right-click on graph to jump to file    Scitech  NET Memory Profiler   Shows stack trace when object was allocated  This is really useful for objects that are allocated in lots of different places  With ANTS it is difficult to determine exactly where the leaked object was created  Shows count of disposable objects that were not disposed  While not indicative of a leak  it does identify opportunities to fix this problem and improve your application performance as a result of faster garbage collection  More detailed filtering options  several columns can be filtered independently   Presents info on total objects created  including those garbage collected   ANTS only shows  live  object stats  This makes it easier to analyze and tune overall application performance  eg  identify where lots of objects being created unnecessarily that aren t necessarily leaking     By way of summary  I think ANTS helps you find what s leaking faster while Scitech provides a bit more detail about your overall application memory performance and individual objects once you know what to look at  eg  stack trace on creation   If the stack trace and tracking of undisposed disposable objects was added to ANTS I wouldn t see the need to use anything else

User · Answer

If Licensing is an issue you could try WINDBG for memory profiling

User · Answer

I ve worked with RedGate s profiler in the past  Did the job for me

User · Answer

Don t forget the awesome scitech  net memory profiler  It s great for tracking down why your  net app is running out of memory

User · Answer

In the past  I   ve used the profiler that ships with Visual Studio Team System

User · Answer

ANTS Profiler  I haven t used many  but I don t really have any complaints about ANTS  The visualization is really helpful

User · Answer

I recently discovered EQATEC Profiler http   www eqatec com tools profiler  It works with most  NET versions and on a bunch of platforms  It is easy to use and parts of it is free  even for commercial use

User · Answer

I would add that dotTrace s ability to diff memory and performance trace sessions is absolutely invaluable  ANTS may also have a memory diff feature  but I didn t see a performance diff    Being able to run a profiling session before and after a bug fix or enhancement  then compare the results is incredibly valuable  especially with a mammoth legacy  NET application  as in my case  where performance was never a priority and where finding bottlenecks could be VERY tedious   Doing a before-and-after diff allows you to see the change in call count for each method and the change in duration for each method   This is helpful not only during code changes  but also if you have an application that uses a different database  say  for each client customer   If one customer complains of slowness  you can run a profiling session using their database and compare the results with a  fast  database to determine which operations are contributing to the slowness   Of course there are many database-side performance tools  but sometimes I really helps to see the performance metrics from the application side  since that s closer to what the user s actually seeing    Bottom line  dotTrace works great  and the diff is invaluable

User · Answer

The current release of SharpDevelop  3 1 1  has a nice integrated profiler  It s quite fast  and integrates very well into the SharpDevelop IDE and its NUnit runner  Results are displayed in a flexible Tree List style  use LINQ to create your own selection   Doubleclicking the displayed method jumps directly into the source code

User · Answer

I must bring an amazing tool to your notice which i have used sometime back  AVICode Interceptor Studio  In my previous company we used this wonderful tool to profile the webapplication  This is supposed to be the single largest web application in the world and the largest civilian IT project ever done   The performance team did wonders with the help of this magnificent tool  It is a pain to configure it  but that is a one time activity and i would say it is worth the time  Checkout this page for details  Thanks  James

User · Answer

The NuMega True Time profiler lives on in DevPartner Studio by Micro Focus  It provides line and method level detail for  NET apps requiring only PDBs  no source needed  but it helps   It can discriminate between algorithmically heavy routines versus those with long I O waits using our proprietary per thread kernel mode timing driver  Version 10 5 ships with new 64-process support on February 4  2011  Shameless plug  I work on the DevPartner product line  Follow up at http   www DevPartner com for news of the 10 5 launch   Disclaimer  I am the Product Manager for DevPartner at Micro Focus

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