Visual Studio Profiler Team Blog : visual studio

See The Profiler At PDC2008

profiler — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:39:00 GMT

Steve Carroll, development lead for the Visual Studio Profiler, will be at PDC2008 next week giving a presentation on the profiler:

What: TL24: Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability
When: Wednesday, October 29th, 1:15pm - 2:30pm
Where: Room 153
Abstract: “Performance must be considered in each step of the development lifecycle. See how to integrate performance in design, development, testing, tuning, and production. Work with tools and technologies like: static analysis, managed memory profiling, data population, load testing, and performance reports. Learn best practices to avoid the performance pitfalls of poor CPU utilization, memory allocation bugs, and improper data sizing.”

If you’re going to be there, it’d be worth checking out some of the new features we’ve been working on as well as seeing how the profiler and load testing tools in Visual Studio Team System can help you improve your software.

UPDATE: The video of this session is now available online. It covers a bunch of new profiler features including Javascript profiling, contention profiling, 'hot lines' source code highlighting, summary page and other UI improvements, load-test integration and numerous other changes that will be shipping in Visual Studio 2010 (Team System).

[Chris Schmich & Colin Thomsen]

Walkthroughs: Using VSTS Test and Profilers to Find Performance Issues

profiler — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:54:00 GMT

Tess Ferrandez recently wrote a couple of articles that extend her popular series of debugging labs to focus on measuring and improving performance.

In 'Using VSTS Test and Profilers to troubleshoot performance issues (low cpu hang)', Tess introduces a performance problem into an ASP.NET application and uses the Visual Studio Profiler with a Load Test to track down the problem.
In 'Using VSTS Test and Profilers to troubleshoot a High CPU in GC issue', Tess tracks down a string concatenation issue that is causing high CPU usage due to garbage collection.

The walkthroughs include sample code, lots of screenshots and analysis.

[Colin Thomsen]

Very Quick Tip: Getting the most out of your screen for viewing call trees

profiler — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:58:00 GMT

I spend a lot of time in the profiler's Call Tree view when I use the profiler. When you are really digging deep into the tree, screen real estate becomes a big issue. There is one very simple Visual Studio trick that really helps out so you can get more of the call tree on the screen at one time without scrolling around. Set the focus on the call tree view and hit Shift-Alt-Enter. It will bring up a full screen view of just the document you are working on which makes it much easier to do the data analysis (especially on wide screen monitors). This works in all VS documents.

[Steve Carroll - scarroll]

Quick Tip: "Save Analyzed" for large VSP files

profiler — Sun, 18 May 2008 09:54:00 GMT

One cool new feature in the Visual Studio 2008 Profiler is the ability to take a large VSP file that has been analyzed once and save the report data into a VSPS file (Visual Studio Profiler Summary files). Saving the analyzed data has several major benefits:

The analyzed data is orders of magnitude smaller than the VSP file. We've seen 4GB trace VSPs get compressed into less than 100K VSPS files.
Because the data saved in the VSPS files has already been processed by our data analyzer, it will load up much faster.
Symbol data is automatically packed into the VSPS file.

VSPS files because of their small size, quick analysis, and saved symbols are perfect for use as saved baselines with the new performance comparison functionality in VS2008. A best practice is to regularly save off VSPS files for your performance scenarios so you can look for performance regressions from one milestone to the next.

This feature is not particularly discoverable. Here's a quick map of where to find it (highlighted in yellow):

One caveat: because the data has already been analyzed in the VSPS file, you can't use filters on VSPS files.

[Steve Carroll - scarroll]

Performance: Find Application Bottlenecks with Visual Studio Profiler

profiler — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 03:05:00 GMT

A couple of members of the profiler team recently wrote an article for msdn magazine, which describes how to use the Visual Studio 2008 profiler to improve the performance of an application. They examined a Mandelbrot fractal drawing program in some detail and isolated and fixed several performance problems in the code, speeding up program execution time approximately tenfold.

[colinth]

Articles on new Visual Studio Team System 2008 profiler features

profiler — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 20:10:00 GMT

I’ve recently been working on a series of post on my blog about many of the cool new features that we are adding in Visual Studio Team System 2008 (codename Orcas). So I figured that I’d post a quick link here to all the articles that I’ve finished so far.

Collecting Performance Counter information with the Visual Studio Profiler

Pinpoint a performance issue using hotpath in Visual Studio 2008

The Visual Studio Profiler Data Collection Control Part 1: Excluding Application Startup Time

Comparing performance reports with the Visual Studio Team System Profiler

[ianhu]

S. Somasegar on new profiler features

profiler — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 01:33:00 GMT

S. Somasegar the VP of Developer Division has just put up a post on his weblog detailing some new profiler and debugger features up coming in VS 2008. Check out the article here.

[ianhu]

Introducing new Visual Studio Profiler Features in the Orcas Beta

profiler — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 22:32:00 GMT

Hey all, I'm rolling out a new series of articles about the new Visual Studio Team System Profiler features that will be included with the latest Orcas beta release. Check out the first article on comparison documents here.

~Ian