EQATEC .NET App Profiler

Someone posted a link to this .NET Profiler tool on Twitter (Twitter FTW!) - so I went and downloaded it and tried it. The tool is called EQATEC Profiler (you can download it here). So what is it?

The way it works it that it rebuild your dlls/exes so when you run it, the tool will be able to profile your .NET method calls and give you a report. Based on the report, you can see which method is the slowest, which one is being called the most number of times, etc. The hope is that based on that data then you can optimize your application to maximize the speed/performance.

When you downloaded the app, it comes with a sample WinForm app. You can use it to see how it works. When it finds the exe/Main() method, it will use it as a starting point when you run it.

My application is an ASP.NET MVC application - so it does not have a Main() method. How do I then profile it?

When you open the profiler, this the screen you will see. Click browse on the top right - and browse to your ASP.NET application bin directory. You can select a dll OR not select any file and just the folder (which will select all dlls in the bin folder). Hit "OK" then make sure all the dlls that you want to profile is checked. Hit the "Build" button on the lower right. Once it's done, you will see that there is a message in the message box saying that it does not find a Main() method. This is OK. Click "Open output folder" on the lower left, and copy all dlls in there back into your original bin folder. Then run your web application (Do NOT run it by hitting F5 - which will overwrite all the dlls from EQATEC. But run it by opening a browser and type "http://localhost:<port>/<appname>". At this point the EQATEC is already attached to your ASP.NET web app process and ready to profile it. So run through your web app (like doing a comprehensive walk-through) and before you are done, click "Run" tab on the EQATEC profiler then hit the "Take snapshot" button. If you are done at this point, you can close your browser. You can take a snapshot anytime you want and they are accumulative - so if you took 5 snapshots, the latest one will have the most comprehensive data out of the 5.

Now highlight the top most (or latest) snapshot you have taken, then click "View" button on the lower right of the "Run" tab. It displays the break-down of all of your method calls during the walk-through. The telemetry includes:

• "Calls" - which is the number of times the method is being called during the walk-through session
• "Avg (self)" - which is the average amount of time spent in that method alone in milliseconds.
• "Total (self)" is the total amount of time spent in the method during the whole time spent in the walk-through.
• "Total (full)" - the total amount of time spent in the method and all the other methods called by it.
• "Avg (full)" is the average - "Total (full) / Calls".

From those data, we should be able to see what method takes the longest to execute and optimize it if necessary - OR - why is a particular method is being called hundred of times and accumulate cost over time and maybe we can put caching to reduce it, etc etc.

Overall, I like this tool as it provides me a way to pin-point the bottlenecks in my application and take action accordingly, instead of just guessing or doing a manual measurement - which is painful and tedious.