dot.NET Profiler

I was on the road the last few days counseling our clients on how performance issues can be detected in .NET applications. Upon perusing my last entry once more, I realized that my account was not complete, since I haven’t yet informed you about the new features SpeedTrace 3.3 is going to bring to the market soon. Therefore, I’d like to just provide you with a short outline of some of the coolest features this tool has.

SpeedTrace 3.3 features:

• Tracing of multiple processes:
  You can run several instances of SpeedTrace in parallel, so you can profile/trace different processes simultaneously in order to help you to focus on certain segments of your application at the same time.
• Call history scoping:
  SpeedTrace enables you to open partial traces just to see the callees of a given function by focusing exclusively on the calls made within a given segment.
• Generating trace output from a terminated process:
  An application that terminates unexpectedly may cause a real headache and waste a lot of time if you cannot analyze its cause properly. Due to SpeedTrace’s robust architecture, it yields reliable results thorough to the last drop even when your application crashes.
• Hotspot filter:
  Whenever you activate it, SpeedTrace will only display the nodes with own times higher than the specified threshold.
• Comparing profile results:
  It is important to know whether changes made within your code have a positive upshot or predominantly negative side effects. You can compare profile results with counterpoint method timings and allocation issues.
• Triggers: Specify the method that will start or stop the profiling process in order to analyze specific behavior within specified boundaries.
• Black box filter:
  3rd party components that cannot be improved always flood the analysis with irrelevant information. SpeedTrace, however, can encapsulate these components by just providing transitions for the ones you need.
• Data trace:
  SpeedTrace helps you to locate bugs (e.g. programming errors, deadlocks, missing or wrong version of DLL) easily, allowing you to examine the data flow channeled through the various functions.
• Code location in Microsoft Visual Studio:
  Whenever you find an issue, a quick tune of the code is required. You can always click on the Source view in SpeedTrace to locate your code in Visual Studio.