My control is awfully slow. Anybody know an EASY-to-USE, FREE profiler for c# development?

Question

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Any Good Free .NET Profiler?

I am currently developping a control that is supposed to draw a heatmap in realtime at about 20Hz. This consumes an awful lot of CPU resources and I would like to know which function calls are slowing it down that much, sine I got the impression that I am already using a fairly efficient algorithm (only redrawing areas that changed, not instantiating any new GDI related objects unless needed, cleaning up after myself using Dispose(), etc...) So any recommendations concerning a profiler that fulfills said conditions or concerning further optimizations of my algorithm would be welcome.

EDIT: I used the EQATEQ profiler and found out that it made no difference whether I changed Graphics.Clip. Turns out that one has to declare a new Region object, modify that, and then call Graphics.Clip = myNewRegionObjet instead of directly modifying Graphics.Clip. This is very weird, as typically a reference should be passed, and therefore making changed to the object should be no problem!? The weird behaviour is described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.drawing.graphics.clip.aspx I changed my control accordingly, which resulted in a more than tenfold speedup. Now its fast enough. :-) Has anybody got any idea why the Graphics.Clip property does exhibit that weird behaviour?

Answer 1

FxCop from Microsoft is free and, I think, not that difficult; for more information see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb429476(VS.80).aspx and for examples see here: http://www.nikhilk.net/Ajax-FxCop.aspx

Answer 2

May be you should try Visual Studio Profiler

for VS2008 and here is a useful articles
Find Application Bottlenecks with Visual Studio Profiler
Code performance analysis in Visual Studio 2008

Answer 3

Many of the full profilers have time-limited trial products with full functionality. If you only need it for a few weeks, I'd look into something like dotTrace from JetBrains.

In fact, dotTrace 4.0 is still in beta, and I have a feeling that as long as it is still in beta, you can keep downloading it and get a longer "trial" period than with the official product, although obviously it may have a few beta issues.

Answer 4

Hmm... i think profilers were noted enough :-) but do you use WPF? thats much more performant than windows forms. specially when you have a lot of objects rendering on the surface.

Answer 5

There are free trial versions of many profilers.

ANTS is easy to use AQTime has more features EQATech - have not used