Code Profiling in Visual Studio 2005

Question

I have a Visual Studio 2005 Solution workspace which in turn has 8 projects included in it. I want to profile the complete code(all the projects) and get some measure about the absolute cycles taken by each function to execute, or at least percentage cycle consumptions.

I checked out help for VS 2005, and also the project setiings options but could not find any pointers on hwo to get the profile info. Any help regarding this would be beneficial.

-AD.

Answer 1

If your application is not particularly processor intensive, redgate ANTS Profiler is a good choice - the line-by-line stats can come in quite handy, and the whole product is clean and well-designed.

If your app needs a lot of CPU to operate normally, however, most of the .NET profilers on the market won't be able to handle it. The only two that I have ever found that will work for a really heavy-weight application are JetBrains dotTrace and YourKit. The two are very similar, which is not surprising, given that YourKit seems to have been started by a former JetBrains employee. I personally prefer dotTrace, but that may just be because that is what I used first, and there has never been any good reason to switch.

I have tested ANTS, AQTime, DevPartner, GlowCode, Borland OptimizeIt and Intel VTune, and all of them have too much overhead to handle a demanding application. (VTune is a possible exception, but it is so horribly complex to configure and use that I was never able to figure out exactly what it could handle. It is also very expensive.)