What to look for in performance analyzer in VS 2008

Question

What to look for in performance analyzer in VS 2008

I am using VS Team system and got the performance wizard and reports going.

What benchmarks/process do I use?

There is a lot of stuff in the reports. Where do I go to find ways to improve my app?

Edit: For example. If I run the wizard, change my application to something I think is better based on looking at the code. And run the wizard again. How can I validate the improvement?

Answer 1

It depends on your app. You need to try to find the bottle neck.

Start by looking at the time taken and see where the most time is being used.

Answer 2

Here is a nice little tutorial on how to use the reports and what to look for.

Answer 3

An msdn tutorial on using the profiler: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc337887.aspx Also you would probably be interested in walking through some of the posts here: http://blogs.msdn.com/profiler/.

The basic idea is to have a run of your scenario that you want to profile. You will have to decide whether to use sampling or instrumentation first.

By default using sampling first to see if you have some obvious bottleneck makes sense. Just pick the functions with the highest samples count and the highest call count and check what you can do to reduce that.

If you want a finer analysis you should switch to instrumentation. The basic idea here is to first look for the functions with the highest inclusive time as %. Check why these take so long and how you can reduce them. Then also look at the functions having the highest exclusive time and see how you can reduce that also.

Hope this helps.