I was recently wanting to do some profiling on an ASP.Net project and was surprised to see that Visual Studio (at least seems to be) lacking a profiler.
So my question is what profiler do you use for ASP.Net? Are there any decent ones out there that are free?
I've seen a few general .Net profilers but have yet to see one that can be used with ASP.Net..
Most profiles can be used with asp.net, We use redgate's ants profile and sometimes dotTrace and both can profile Asp.net just fine.
there is really not a lot of difference between Asp.net apps and say windows forms apps, the only difference is instead of attaching to your application's exe file you attach to the w3wp.exe
I had a very good experience using AQTime. It helped me very quickly identify all my hot spots and in particular it let me narrow in on unnecessary DB queries, its got a line by line profiler and it integrates with VS so you can browse your code and see the profiling metrics in the "gutter" (next to the line numbers).
In the course of a few hours of banging on my site with the profiler running i was able to make serious improvements in page latency. I highly recommend it. plus they have a free 2-3 week trial that is full featured.
Part of the answer may depend on whether your wanting performance or memory profiling. There is a performance profiler in SharpDevelop, but it doesn't support ASP.Net (at least not last time I checked).
For Memory Profiling, the only free profiler I know of is the CLR Memory Profiler. Its been a while since I've used it, but I'm fairly sure it supports ASP.Net without issues.
dotTrace from Jetbrains is hands down the best profiler I've used. It's easy to use and easy to interpret the results. The biggest down side is the price.
Redgate has the Ants Profiler for both memory and performance. It's been around for a long time, but I personally find it harder to use than the Jetbrains profiler. Once again the price for these products are not insignificant.
If all your interested in is memory profiling, then the SciTech profiler is really nice. It has some very nice features (like unmanaged memory usage tracking), and the price is much more approachable than both the Redgate and Jetbrains products.
All of these work fine with ASP.Net, so no worries there. They also have some limited trial period that you can use them without paying, but it is typically something like 14 days.