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]
I'm not sure what a non-instrumenting profiler is, but I can say for .NET I love RedGate's ANTS Profiler. Version 3 beats the MS version for ease of use and Version 4, which allows arbitrary time slices, makes MS look like a joke.
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.
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.
I have tried Intel's vtune with a rather large project about two years ago. It was an instrumenting profiler then and it took so long to instrument the DLL that I was attempting to profile that I eventually lost patience after an hour.
The one tool that I have had quite good success and which i would highly recommend is that of AQTime. It not only provides excellent performance profiling resources but it also doe really good memory profiling which has been of significant help to me in tracking down memory leaks.
We use both VTune and AQTime, and I can vouch for both. Which works best for you depends on your needs. Both have free trial versions - I suggest you give them a go.
The Windows Driver Kit includes a non-instrumenting user/kernel sampling profiler called "kernrate". It seems useful for profiling multi-process applications, applications that spend most of their time in the kernel, and device drivers (of course). It's also available in the KrView (Kernrate Viewer) and Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools packages.
Kernrate works on Windows 2000 and later (unlike Xperf, which requires Vista / Server 2008). It's command-line based and the documentation has a somewhat intimidating list of options. I'm not sure if it can record call stacks or just the program counter. If you use a symbol server, make sure to put an up-to-date dbghelp.dll and symsrv.dll in the same directory as kernrate.exe to prevent it from using the ancient version of dbghelp.dll that is installed in %SystemRoot%\system32.
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.
Luke Stackwalker seems promising -- it's not as polished as I'd like, but it is open source and it does do something that seems very close to what @Mike Dunlavey keeps saying we ought to do. (Of course, it then tries to smoosh it all down into the typically-unhelpful call graphs that Mike is so weary of, but it shouldn't be too hard to fix that with the source as our ally.)
It even seems to count time spent waiting in the kernel, as far as I can tell...