Best .Net Profiling Utility

[mcquiggd]

Currently using .Net 2, C#, ASP,Net.

Found a bottleneck in one of teams code using Ants Profiler installed on a UAT server... seemed to work pretty well. The visual studio tools for such things don't seem to really be more than beta, and the DevPartner Server license would cost more than the bloody server hardware itself!!! The DevPartner suite is quite good, but simply too expensive really.

Any recommendations from the esteemed audience for both performance and memory usage of ASP.Net apps - preferably able to pinpoint lines of code if source is avalaible... but simply identifying methods called and being able to drill down to find the likely culprit would be a start.

So far, has to be said, the Ants Profiler does look good - connects to the asp worker process it seems and measures that. Snapshots give adequate data too, but if if anyone has done such testing for a living, please share your thoughts....

[AtW]

I've done a lot of .NET profiling this and last year, tried many profilers but found Ant to be the best, not just price but overall - simple and nice, works faster than others too: very cheap as well, I tried some big tools that cost ridiculous amounts of money (I tried DevPartner too), so much that it is hard to actually get download from the company, and they were pants.

IMO stick to Ants, it could do some things better but it does more than enough to make serious profiling very successful.

[HankWangford]

I use ANTS most weeks to ensure no perf problems, great toolset. Good tool to have to hand to train those pesky permies and their expensive ways of working (isnt reflection cool, lets use it everywhere)

Ants and fxcop are more than a match for devstudio and their salesman, must go through 12 rounds with the w@nkers before they will give you an evaluation code.

Also helpfull and sometimes more valuable are the http sniffer tools fiddler, IE Watch.
No good having the quickest assemblies on earth if they are pumping 300k worth of tr tags to the client.


another one for you to evaluate perhaps is Jetbrains.....demo here http://www.jetbrains.com/profiler/dotTrace_demo.html. I had a watch of it but still think ANTS is superior.

[mcquiggd]

Cheers chaps... I had a run in with Compuware's sales team a while back and they gave my company some 30 day trial licences, and it wasnt that bad - collating statistics across an n-tier setup was reasonably effective - but when we saw the price... oh.. my... gawd...!!!! It's about £11k!!!!

I think the fact that we could install Ants on a UAT server in 5 minutes, stick a debug build of the code on their, remote console onto it and take a snapshot was about all we really needed - it pointed out the problem methods straight away, enabling drill down to the real killer call which involved serilization.

I was in a meeting today and the second in command completely glossed over that it was myself and the guy (a very smart guy - more of a mathematician perhaps) who had spent our lunch hour identifying the problem and finding a fix. She heaped praise on three other people (who had nothing to do with the project) who had faffed around for 3 days triumphantly claiming it was down to Garbage Collection.

We involved them in our multi user tests, and showed it was completely unncessary serialisation to the old User Interface Process Block state in SQL Server... yet they still did the old nodding dog impression to the boss today.

Myself and the guy who is fixing the bad code are going to publish the profiles 'before and after'... put it this way, performance is improved from 2 - 5 minutes , on one ASP page, to about 5 seconds.

Added : I have Fiddler installed as well, and it is great as a debugging tool.... found a page sending 200k of viewstate once

[AtW]

Ants is not that good for memory leaks, but for general profiling it's excellent. DevPartner stuff is overpriced and overbloated, far cry from good days of SoftIce.

[HankWangford]

"Added : I have Fiddler installed as well, and it is great as a debugging tool.... found a page sending 200k of viewstate once [/QUOTE]


indeedy, frightening what a gridview and client validators can do to the output, along with the 300 js scripts if your using atlas et al

[HankWangford]

Ants is not that good for memory leaks, but for general profiling it's excellent. DevPartner stuff is overpriced and overbloated, far cry from good days of SoftIce.

I found AQtime to be better and less fiddly than devstudio, but still couldnt justify the extra cost compared to ANTS.

AtW how do you memory profile if you dont like the ANTS mem profiler.....also why not

[AtW]

I tried AQTime but found it too heavy - I think I tried almost all profilers on the market last year and Ants is by far the best, especially given very cheap price - devpartner price is a joke IMO!

I had a lot of issues with memory leaks in .NET, it was hell on earth, I'd say all memory profilers are crap in this respect, at least when tough cases are concerned, ie not a single leak, but leaks in many places, not leaks really, but lots of objects that fragment heap.

I found this profiler better for memory due to real time charts, plus other goodies, it is free too: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

Ants is poor when memory profiling is concerned, I only use it for performance profiling.