Getting all profile happy with JustTrace

Recently I have been developing a fair size application and so far everything seemed to be "just working" fine. However during testing I noticed a few times the app seemed to stall up. This left me quite unhappy and I knew it was time to relook at some of my "decisions". Initial glances through the code didn't really highlight anything so I thought it about time to profile the application and see what it can find.

In the past I have used Redgate's Ants Profiler and an early version of Telerik's JustTrace. I decided to give Telerik's JustTrace a go again as I have heard alot about it and wanted to see how it's changed / grown.

Alas, my initial attempt to use JustTrace ended quite abruptly, I've been developing on Windows 8 and VS2012 exclusively for about 5 months now and sadly JustTrace didn't support IIS8 or IIS Express 8. I was gutted to find this out but a quick chat to the Telerik Dev Team and Chris Eargle gave me hope as they advised me the Q3 update was right around the corner, 1 week to be exact, and it brought all the new toys into the game,

HURRAH!

So tonight I got it all updated and fired up, and started profiling my app. Profiling is immensely easy to perform, simply enable justtrace in the Telerik menu and hit F5 :) You are asked how you want to profile, i chose to simply [].

You then simply start using your application like normal and JustTrace sits there observing and recording what it is up too. Once you have spent some testing you can really start digging around. The first thing to notice is the Timeline view, this is showing all the CPU activity whilst running through the application. You want to start looking at where you have some peaks, and in particular extended CPU activity.
Timeline View
By clicking on an area of the timeline you get a larger view where you can highlight a time snapshot to view.
Show Snapshot

You can then look at a ton of options to find your issue, by looking at the call trees across all threads, all methods and even look straight into "hot spots". Hot spots are each threads expensive method in terms of time. In my current snapshot Assembly.Load was very expensive, but this was app startup, not what I was noticing.

Hot Spot View


By looking at the other peaks I did find where 3 seconds was going, executing queries against the database. Now this could be down to bad queries, but its more likely to be a bad use of Linq with Entity Framework, and not compiling queries etc. However now I know where to look and it only took me 5 - 10 minutes of profiling to find out. Fantastic, stuff and I've not even touched memory profiling !

My Hot Spot
Hopefully I can do before my trial runs out, but so far it looks worthwhile investing in, here's hoping I can get some BizSpark discount ;)

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