Visual Studio Profiler Team Blog : vsts

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]

Tip: VS2008 - Understanding Performance Targets

profiler — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 23:59:00 GMT

If you have a solution that contains multiple projects it is important to know what the 'Targets' group in the Performance Explorer is used for. The PeopleTrax solution shown on the right has 4 projects, with 3 of them compiling to managed DLLs and 1 compiling to an executable.

After running the Performance Wizard to create a Performance Session the Performance Explorer contains a single target as shown below.

Only the project that compiles to an executable is listed in the 'Targets' folder (for other project types like websites it would include the default launch project). What about the other 3 projects? As this tip explains, it depends upon the type of profiling you wish to do.

Sampling

With sampling there is no need to add the additional projects to your targets list. We do not modify assemblies when sampling and we will automatically attempt to collect data for any assemblies loaded by the PeopleTrax target. The only exception to this requirement is if you wish to collect data for multi-process scenarios and therefore need to launch multiple targets.

Instrumentation

For instrumentation, if you wish to collect data for the additional projects they should be added to your targets list as follows:

In the Performance Explorer, right-click on the 'Targets' folder:
Choose 'Add Target Project' to display a dialog:
Select the assemblies you wish to collect Instrumentation data for and choose OK.

The selected projects will now be modified (instrumented) when you start profiling. You can selectively disable instrumentation for certain projects by right-clicking on the target and unchecking the 'Instrument' option.

Instrumentation properties for a specific target.

[Colin Thomsen]