Decent profiler for Windows? [duplicate]

Question

Does windows have any decent sampling (eg. non-instrumenting) profilers available? Preferably something akin to Shark on MacOS, although i am willing to accept that i am going to have to pay for such a profiler on windows.

I've tried the profiler in VS Team Suite and was not overly impressed, and was wondering if there were any other good ones.

[Edit: Erk, i forgot to say this is for C/C++, rather than .NET -- sorry for any confusion]

Answer 1

For Windows, check out the free Xperf that ships with the Windows SDK. It uses sampled profile, has some useful UI, & does not require instrumentation. Quite useful for tracking down performance problems. You can answer questions like:

Who is using the most CPU? Drill down to function name using call stacks.

Who is allocating the most memory?

Outstanding memory allocations (leaks)

Who is doing the most registry queries?

Disk writes? etc.

Answer 2

I know I'm adding my answer months after this question was asked, but I thought I'd point out a decent, open-source profiler: Very Sleepy.

It doesn't have the feature count that some of the other profilers mentioned before do, but it's a pretty respectable sampling profiler that will work very well in most situations.

Answer 3

Intel VTune is good and is non-instrumenting. We evaluated a whole bunch of profilers for Windows, and this was the best for working with driver code (though it does unmanaged user level code as well). A particular strength is that it reads all the Intel processor performance counters, so you can get a good understanding of why your code is running slowly, and it was useful for putting prefetch instructions into our code and sorting out data layout to work well with the cache lines, and the way cache lines get invalidated in multi core systems.

It is commercial, and I have to say it isn't the easiest UI in the world.

Answer 4

AMD's CodeAnalyst is FREE here