Profiling C# / .NET applications

Question

How do you trace/profile your .NET applications? The MSDN online help mentions Visual Studio Team (which I do not possess) and there is the Windows Performance Toolkit. But, are there other solutions you can recommend? Preferably (of course) a solution that works without changing the code (manually) and that can be integrated in Visual Studio.

Answer 1

See also this question. JetBrains dotTrace is the best .NET profiler I have found (and I have tried pretty much every one there is), because it is the only one that has low enough overhead to handle a processor-intensive application. It is also simple, accurate and well-designed - highly recommended!

Answer 2

Happy birthday:

http://www.jetbrains.com/profiler/

Answer 3

Ants Profiler works for me http://www.red-gate.com/products/ANTS_Profiler/

Answer 4

CLR Profiler is quite good.

Answer 5

I think this is the best free one: http://www.productivity-boost.com/Download.aspx

The website is german but you can just download it, the software is english.

Answer 6

I like dotTrace3.1 It has worked really well for me.

Answer 7

If you are looking for something free, I use NProf. Although its pretty limited and may crash or hang on certain programs.

http://nprof.sourceforge.net/Site/Description.html

Answer 8

Not free, but I just had a tough issue in huge code base with streams. Visual Studio's profiler got me close, but Antz Profiler locked it down. It isn't free, but it was much less painless than setting up Visual Studio.

Answer 9

.NET Memory Profiler is an excellent tool for profiling memory usage.

Answer 10

Our team uses EQATEC Profiler, I've found it simple and easy to use. It works without changes to the source code, but I don't think Visual Studio integration is possible.