Best way to profile a live website in IIS7?

[Uwe Keim]

Currently I'm experiencing every now and then 100% CPU usage of w3wp.exe for a certain application pool.

Looking at various performance counters, I'm still unable to determine the real cause, since I cannot determine in which part of my code the high CPU utilization takes place.

What I now can imagine is to install ANTS Profiler on my productive server and let it run several hours to get some meaningful logs.

My question is:

- Is this a good way to find these kind of issues?
- Any suggestions on what I plan to do?
- Is it possible at all?

Thanks
Uwe
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[dene.boulton]

Hello Uwe,

If you are willing there is nothing to stop you from running ANTS Performance Profiler 6.x (APP) on your production server for a few hours.
If you have a test server then this is the recommended deployment environment for the application, but of course that depends on if the performance problems are also present there - from your post I am assuming not.

Profiling in a continuous/live environment is a task we are currently exploring for future releases of APP and we are in the middle of running an Early Access Program (EAP) for APP 7 that incorporates the beginning of this continuous profiling functionality. This is achieved within a separate Web UI.

We are recommending the deployment of the EAP to be on a development/test environment; in this case this is due to the tool being in the earlier stages of development, and we are still exploring the feasibility of deploying it in particular setups.
The current functionality of the EAP's Continuous Profiler does not allow you to filter via Application Pools yet (though of course this is planned).

The EAP can be found at: http://help.red-gate.com/help/ANTSPerformanceProfiler/download_eap.html
The setup documentation can be found here: http://downloads.red-gate.com/HelpPDF/ANTS_Performance_Profiler/ContinuousProfilingGettingStarted.pdf
The current supported browsers for the Continuous Profiling Web UI are Internet Explorer 9, Firefox and Chrome.
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Dene Boulton
Red Gate

[Uwe Keim]

Thanks a lot Dene for your kind reply!

I'll give the EAP a try, sounds great.

Uwe
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[dene.boulton]

Another thing I should point out is that the current functionality of the EAP's Continuous Profiler only shows Wall-Clock time - again this is just due to these being the very first EAP builds. CPU Time will appear in future builds as the tool is further developed.
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Dene Boulton
Red Gate

[dene.boulton]

Good Morning,

Just to point out that a new build, 7.0.0.803, is now available. Coincidentally the previous EAP builds (7.0.0.802) Timebomb will of expired yesterday.
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Dene Boulton
Red Gate

[Uwe Keim]

Thanks, Dene!
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