Profiling Startup Of VS2012 – JustTrace Profiler
- by Alois Kraus
JustTrace is made by Telerik which is mainly known for its collection of UI controls. The current version (2012.3.1127.0) does include a performance and memory profiler which does cost 614€ and is currently with a special offer for 306€ on sale. It does include one year of free upgrades. The uneven € numbers are calculated from the 799€ and 50% dicsount price. The UI is already in Metro style and simple to use. Multi process, attach, method recording filter are not supported. It looks like JustTrace is like Ants a Just My Code profiler. For stuff where you do not have the pdbs or you want to dig deeper into the BCL code you will not get far. After getting the profile data you get in the All Methods grid a plain list with hit count and own time. The method list for all methods is also suspiciously short which is a clear sign that you will not get far during the analysis of foreign code. But at least there is also a memory profiler included. For this I have to choose in the first window for Profiling Type “Memory Profiler” to check the memory consumption of VS. There are some interesting number to see but I do really miss from YourKit the thread stack window. How am I supposed to get a clue when much memory is allocated and the CPU consumption is high in which places I should look? The Snapshot summary gives a rough overview which is ok for a first impression. Next is Assemblies? This gives you a list of all loaded assemblies. Not terribly useful. The By Type view gives you exactly what it is supposed to do. You have to keep in mind that this list is filtered by the types you did check in the Assemblies list. The By Type instance list does only show types from assemblies which do not originate from Microsoft. By default mscorlib and System are not checked. That is the reason why for the first time my By Type window looked like The idea behind this feature is to show only your instances because you are ultimately responsible for the overall memory consumption. I am not sure if I do like this feature because by default it does hide too much. I do want to see at least how many strings and arrays are allocated. A simple namespace filter would also do it in my opinion. Now you can examine all string instances and look who in the object graph does keep a reference on them. That is nice but YourKit has the big plus that you can also look into the string contents. I am also not sure how in the graph cycles are visualized and what will happen if you have thousands of objects referencing you. That's pretty much it about JustTrace. It can help the average developer to pinpoint performance and memory issues by just looking at his own code and instances. Showing them more will not help them because the sheer amount of information will overwhelm them. And you need to have a pretty good understanding how the GC and the CLR does work. When you have a performance issue at a customer machine it is sometimes very helpful to be able a bring a profiler onto the machine (no pdbs, …) and to get a full snapshot of all processes which are in the problematic use case involved. For these more advanced use cased JustTrace is certainly the wrong tool. Next: SpeedTrace
