Developers need to optimize application performance and for this, .net profilers work best. .Net profilers are important especially when developers need to do low level CPU and memory optimization. To be precise, there are total three types of .net profilers that developers can use. We will discuss them all and explain why developers need all of them.
1. Traditional .Net profilers
Traditional .net profilers are used to track process memory usage, frequency of method calls and time spent per line of code. The standard .net profilers are the tools that include CLR profiler products, such as VS .net profiler, DotTrace, ANTS, SciTech, and YourKit.
When a developer applies a profiler of some type, he is having a bad day. In other words, he is chasing some problems related to bad CPU or memory usage. For instance, he is trying to find obscure memory leaks. These tools are a savior when need the most. However, the same tools are much resource intensive and slow down the speed of the developer whenever he uses them.
The majority of developers have never or hardly used these types of profilers since these are not required regularly for apps created by the developers.
Traditional use of .net profiler-
- High memory usage – .Net profilers are robust tool for tracking memory leaks and optimizing memory usage.
- CPU usage out of control – When the server CPU is extremely high and you don’t know the reason, .net profiler can help you to find out why it is happening.
- Proactive tuning of the performance- The job of optimizing CPU usage for a few applications can never end.
Traditional .net profiler uses the .Net CLR profiling interface to allow profiling of the .net MSIL byte code at a low level. This helps in understanding every operation performed by the code. Developers are able to see the “hot path” inside the code to find which methods are using the maximum CPU.
Experts use the visual studio profiler and ANTS to correct the performance of the Windows monitoring agent. Their goal is to add least overhead on the servers used by the customers. They even use it to detect memory leaks.
Some .net profilers used by experts are-
- Red Gate ANTS
- Visual Studio performance profiler
- dotTrace
2. Lightweight .net Transaction Profiler
Lightweight profilers are used for tracking the high-level performance of the application of the user. These profilers help users to understand total page load time, which DB calls were executed, and more.
Lightweight .net profiler transaction tracing tools are made for developers to help them in their day-to-day job. These are specifically made to not put a huge performance impact on app code and so you developers can use them every time, on regular basis.
There are three primary tools that .net developers can use as asp.net profilers. Their implementation and working is different and they provide different type of information.
- Glimpse – It is installed within the app and needs several configuration changes along with nugget packages. Glimpse is an open source project undertaken by Microsoft and it doesn’t use .net CLR profiler. It rather uses an extension and packages framework for extra support for several app dependencies and technologies. Developers need to make a few tweaks to the code which only works with web apps.
- MiniProfiler – MiniProfiler is installed within an app and can be found as “lightweight tracing tool”. There is no usage of .net CLR profiler. Developers are able to track DB calls by making changes to code to wrap their SQL connections. They can even change the code to address extra steps in the code if they want to include it in the pseudo profile traces. MiniProfiler also works with web apps only and requires more changes to code.
- Stackify prefix – This is installed on the workstation of the developer outside of the app. It is based on .net CLR profiler and applies the same technology used by APM product. Stackify Prefix needs no code or configuration tweaks to perform. Developers are able to track the performance of more than 30 common .net frameworks and libraries automatically.
3. APM
Profiling production .net apps tools include New Relic, Stackify Retrace, Dynatrace and other similar products.
Aggregating performance details is the key feature of APM which is done across all transactions, app and servers. This makes developers easy to understand the performance of the app. Profilers are most powerful and robust tools that can be used by developing team of Asp.net Development Company to measure and enhance the performance of the apps. Experienced developers suggest understanding all three types of .net profilers discussed in this post. These tools should be always there in the toolbox of the developers.
