dot.NET Profiler

A dot.NET profiler provides you with the ability to time areas of an application, normally an entire application, so that bottlenecks can be discovered and displayed. Hence, the buzz practice of profiling which means during-runtime performance monitoring of programs developed in dot.NET.

When developing dot.net applications, it is always necessary to take the performance factor into account right from the outset. That is how you can save a lot of costs for rewriting modules, modifying codes, or deploying the same application over and over again.

Developers know as a fact that in order to write good quality codes, it is necessary to make frequent code reviews, testing different ways of implementing them to determine their performance impact on dot.net applications. However, these kind of reviews tend to be slow-going and tedious, thus exponentially increasing development time and sometimes developers’ frustration while organisations face the dual task of having to create software that meets best practice standards and, at the same time, deliver dot.net applications within the set budget on time.

This is where SpeedTrace dot.net profiler enters the scene and hooks into dot.net applications by scrutinizing calls (enter/exits), JIT compilations, managed and unmanaged code transitions, thread switches, garbage collection, exception handling, data traces, and more … all during program execution — consequently making developers’ lives easier.

There are many dot.net profilers on the market, but not many like SpeedTrace robust enough to work the load of large-scale applications. Dot.net applications tend to grow in complexity, therefore, companies are struggling hard to fulfil the necessary levels of application performance. This applies especially when applications running on multi-core systems are managed and profiled improperly and thus impair the organisation’s ability to meet the performance demands of complex applications.

Software quality is closely related to flawless operability which is translated into faultless performance applications. In most cases the failure to use adequate dot.net profiler tools able to quickly provide both accurate and relevant information leads to poor software quality. Therefore, it is important to spend sufficient time and care on performance issues within dot.NET applications since this is what, in the end, will reward you with the most customer satisfaction and business success.

Microsoft released the .NET Framework 3.5 on Monday, November 19, 2007.

We have installed and tested the SpeedTrace dot.NET Profiler against the new .NET Framework 3.5. During preliminary tests, SpeedTrace performed properly and no errors were detected. We will inform you in case any changes are made.

We have recently released a maintenance for SpeedTrace dot.NET Profiler 3.2 — v3.2.14 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

These two versions are available here in the SpeedTrace blog or under http://www.ipcas.com/trace-and-profile/download.html

This release contains several improvements, few minor fixes and additional features.

In regard to the new additional features, you can now profile multiple processes by having several instances of SpeedTrace recording your running processes at the same time. Moreover, you won’t have to contend anymore with sudden terminations of dot.NET processes without yielding information. Now, you’ll also be able to generate trace output from terminated processes without any hassle.

We would like to thank you for all your interest in SpeedTrace during the dot.Net Prio.Conference 2007 that took place in Baden-Baden, Germany. Likewise, our special thanks go to all the people present at our presentation "Efficient Analysis of dot.NET Applications with SpeedTrace Profiler". We hope this conference was informative.

Bug-trapping and dot.net analysis can be a very
time-consuming task … See how you can improve it!

In this first article, we want to exemplify the strong points of SpeedTrace by explaining the importance of having a dot.net profiler and tracer in one.

With its profiler, SpeedTrace traces your application first and then performs the profiling process (i.e. the aggregations) later. This sets SpeedTrace apart from all its competitors, since it retains the time dimension, providing the real and accurate information for every single call.

With its tracer, SpeedTrace enables any dot.net application to register and update large numbers of performance counters in runtime. By collecting them first, SpeedTrace dot.net provides the flexibility for subsequent data analyses helping you to not only identify performance weaknesses, but also to detect bugs such as deadlocks, software design faults, and resource or data flaw problems.

As stated before, bug-trapping is important, however, bug-trapping and performing dot.net analyses can also become a very time-consuming task. However, if the dot.net developer uses SpeedTrace to locate bugs and flaws during the early coding and testing stages, this will put him in a position to accurately trap and fix consistently throughout the development cycle and thus save time and improve quality sustantially!

With SpeedTrace it is basically a matter of a few clicks to turn a developer’s desktop into a workstation that also profiles, tests and quantifies the effects of application code performance within dot.net applications.

Be more productive! SpeedTrace will help you to move away from purely reactive application performance to the far more desirable preventive approach. Achieve higher quality and faster application deployment by ensuring that the dot.net code is sufficiently robust and optimized right from the outset. Be proactive — use SpeedTrace!

The dot.net Profiler Weblog

This blog is intended to work as a platform for the dot.net development arena aimed at providing the means for best practices in your daily dot.net development work.

We would also like to introduce SpeedTrace, specially designed to profile and trace dot.net applications. Due to its small overhead and its warp speed trace engine, it just happens to be the most accurate and efficient profiler on the market.

This tool can be used not only as a profiler, but also combines the advantages of a bug trapper and a tracer. With all these features working together, SpeedTrace provides the developer with a most powerful toolkit to combat software imperfections and tackle development issues. Besides, it doesn’t alter the internal timing of your dot.net applications, and therefore, doesn’t lead to mixed results or misleading conclusions.

We understand that developers always wish to be in perfect control of their work. With the SpeedTrace dot.net profiler and the help of its sophisticated trigger and filter system, developers will be able to control the entire profiling and tracing process of their dot.net applications during runtime.

Performance plays a crucial role wherever software development is involved. Adequate performance analyses and regular testing and evaluation will help developers to produce dot.net tools of supreme quality. And it goes without saying that quality creates customer satisfaction, and customer satisfaction … SALES!

There are lots of things you can’t start early enough — how about profiling the performance of your dot.net applications?

We hope we were able to arouse your curiosity and would like to invite you to take part in this new dot.net blog. Let’s generate completely fresh, new ideas together to help our dot.net developer colleagues brighten their daily routine!