Free .NET Profiler for .NET 4.0 mixed code

Question

I checked out some of the performance profilers mentioned here. But...

• EQATec didn't work for me because I have many assemblies I want to profile, and it has a limit on assemblies to profile. How much of a hassle is getting a free license? I'd go for it if someone guaranteed me that EQATec can profile both managed and unmanaged code
• SlimTune only profiled my managed code, even if I set "Profile native functions" to "True"
• XTE Profiler is no longer free
• We have a copy of AQTime 6 we bought before, but it doesn't seem to support .NET 4.0 apps (it can't even start my app)
• We use Visual Studio 2010 Professional SP1, so we don't have the Visual Studio profiler
• I tried the "poor man's profiling" (halting the program many times and seeing where it is), but I get way too random results and I'm more used to traditional profiling

(I've spent the whole day stumped on this, sorry if I was too negative)

UPDATE: After I cleaned my solution, built it again and checked all debug info (.pdb) was copied to the same directory as the executable, I tried AQTime again and it worked! It showed me routine timing info for both managed and unmanaged code, so my problem is solved. However, I'm using a paid profiler, so the question will remain open until I take a look at xperf or someone comes up with something else

Answer 1

AQTime have a free version of their latest profiler (http://smartbear.com/products/free-tools/aqtime-standard/) It supports .Net 4, But I doubt it can do a mixed profile of Native and Managed.

If you are really serious about it you might look into the Microsoft xperf tools (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/performance). They have a steep learning curve but they are free and I doubt any commercial profiler can do what xperf can (the instrumentation is in the OS, not in a separate process, thus either Vista, win7 or win2K8 are required). I'm waiting for someone to write a nice GUI around it, but it's taking a bit long... ;-)

xperf will profile your native code and you can load your symbols into the result viewer. I don't think it will go down to per-line granularity though. It has has a .Net CLR Provider (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264809.aspx). The cool thing about xperf is that it can also show other processes that may be influencing your performance (you are free to switch it off and only profile your own process). For example: it is capable of revealing that your IO is slow due to a badly written USB driver, virus scanner or firewall software. A traditional profiler would only show the slow IO, causing you to focus on a non-bottleneck.

By the way, there is also an ICorProfilerCallback interface you can utilize to write your own profiler (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/s5ec0es1.aspx).

Answer 2

I' pretty sure the answer to your question is "There isn't one".

In comparing a whole bunch of .NET profilers a few months ago I found only very few could do mixed .NET/native profiling: AQTime ($599) and Glowcode ($499) could. Or so they say - I didn't try it.

EQATEC, Visual Studio, ANTS, Jetbrains dotTrace, Yourkit, XteProfiler, Slimtune etc could not, so I doubt you'll find a free profiler anytime soon that can.