Red Gate forums: ANTS Memory Profiler 7

RE: Crash of WebDev.WebServer40.exe on Snapshot

Chris.Allen — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:22:18 GMT

To try to get you up and running as quickly as possible- use the 'attach to process' method in ANTS- just start webdev as normal. In Ants- you'll get the list of processes to attach to ad then you can hook in and start to take snapshots hopefully.

If this doesn't work, we might have to inspect a memory dump.

Crash of WebDev.WebServer40.exe on Snapshot

MrT — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:43:32 GMT

I'm trying to profile an ASP.net MVC application (VS Development Server)but when I try to take a snapshot the webserver process crashes (error log below).

I'm using VS2012 11.0.50727.1 and Ants 7.4.0.41

Any help would be gratefully received.

Thanks
Richard

Faulting application name: WebDev.WebServer40.exe, version: 10.0.40219.1, time stamp: 0x4d5f345a
Faulting module name: diasymreader.dll, version: 8.0.50727.5420, time stamp: 0x4ca2cdf7
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0005436c
Faulting process id: 0x1ee8
Faulting application start time: 0x01ce563d88bcd142
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\DevServer\10.0\WebDev.WebServer40.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\diasymreader.dll
Report Id: ec688b30-c230-11e2-b982-001c4277449c

RE: Profiling a different machine

jessica.ramos — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:58:24 GMT

Ah, so sorry about this inconvenience. Remote profiling is on our feature request list though and I've also shared your reply with the team--thanks very much for the feedback!

RE: "By disposed objects" filter not available

philippdolder — Tue, 21 May 2013 07:01:51 GMT

Hi Brian,

Same here. I'm targeting 4.0 as well. I contacted support by E-Mail once again.

RE: Profiling a different machine

AdamsGuitar — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:48:36 GMT

I understand. Please consider implementing something like this; I know that other memory profiler products provide simple utilities that can run on client machines to capture memory snapshots that can then be copied to a machine running the full version to perform the analysis. As it is now, I may have to use another profiler to solve this problem, which doesn't make me terribly happy.

RE: Profiling a different machine

jessica.ramos — Fri, 17 May 2013 21:10:02 GMT

I'm sorry to say that the Memory Profiler will need to be installed and running on the customer's machine. :/

RE: Windows 8/IE 10 and Silverlight 5 App`

Chris.Allen — Fri, 17 May 2013 10:44:27 GMT

We have good news- we have a patch that solves the Win8, SL5, IE10 issue:

ftp://support.red-gate.com/patches/ANTSMemoryProfiler/23Jan2013/

just overwrite your existing version.

When we bring out the next major version it will, of course, incorporate this patch code (and will have some really juicy new features too).

Profiling a different machine

AdamsGuitar — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:01:14 GMT

We have a customer who has an odd issue where our application is using up a huge amount of memory on the machine. We've so far been unable to reproduce the issue in our testing environment, so I'd like to use the Memory Profiler to examine snapshots. Unfortunately, we don't have permission to install new software on their computer, but I can copy files and run any executables.

Is there any way to either...

a) Deploy the memory profiler using XCopy (i.e. no Windows installer involved)
b) Capture a snapshot using a different utility, then perform analysis on the file back on my properly licensed machine?

RE: Not getting proper reference to the object

jessica.ramos — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:08:35 GMT

Hi there,

Thank you for your post. I believe we also have a support ticket open with you, but I've copied my last email below:

You can try expanding those objects' properties which might give some clues to determine the source where they were created. However, the profiler unfortunately gives no obvious link to the source code (as I understand it, this is for performance reasons) and so working out where exactly in the source code they were created can be quite tricky, especially when the objects don't directly relate to classes in your code. :/

RE: "By disposed objects" filter not available

bdemers — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:03:20 GMT

Philip,

I am experiencing the same issue as you; have you found any solutions since you posted last on this thread in April? For what it's worth, I found this page that says the "Disposed objects" filter is not available if your application targets .NET 1.1. Is that your problem? The application I am attempting to use this filter on is targeting 4.0.30319.296 so that, sadly, is not my issue.

Sincerely,
Brian Demers

Not getting proper reference to the object

RVA_Profiling — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:38:33 GMT

Hi,

I am using Prism in my application and while profiling I can that one of my user defined object is getting created by "Hashtable". The chain is ... "Hashtable"-->"System.Collections.Hashtable+bucket[]".. and so on ... Could you please help in determining the actual source of that object creation ?

RE: New Object Filter

james.billings — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:02:39 GMT

Thanks for your post. On the face of it, I'm not sure what would be happening here. According to the documentation, "New" is shown when the object in question is new between the two snapshots you're working with (not necessarily the baseline).

From your description then, it either sounds like we're spuriously detecting a new object when it's not actually the case, or something is triggering a new object to be created outside of your test processes.

I had a quick check in our bugtracker, and the behaviour you describe isn't currently listed as a known problem as far as I can see. Is it possible for you to recreate the problem in a smaller test-case (or are we able to obtain a copy of your application to test here?) If we can reproduce the same behaviour then I'm happy to log a bug and/or explain what's occurring

New Object Filter

aaronkupen — Fri, 10 May 2013 16:11:03 GMT

I'm currently trying to use this memory profiling software to determine the memory characteristics of some software that needs to have as close to 24/7 up-time as possible. I'm noticing some quirks when I try to do analysis using the "new object" filter.

What does it truly mean to be a new object? I'm aware of the context behind "new" when it comes to snapshots: if it wasn't in the baseline snapshot but exists in the current snapshot, then it is "new". But this doesn't necessarily seem to be working properly from my experience.

My procedure/scenario that I use to see this is as follows:

1) In my software I have a network object that gets created whenever a client connects to my service, creating the new network object on my service. The memory profiling software sees this and displays this behavior correctly.

2) After several minutes of idle time, and I can confirm that nothing is happening on the application level of my software, I take another snapshot and it correctly shows that no new objects were being created.

3) After another several minutes of idle time, I see that a new network object was created according to the memory profiler. My old one is no longer in the "surviving objects" filter. How can this be explained assuming that I am NOT instantiated a new networking object in my code?

I have logging statements in my constructor that explicitly lets me know when these objects have been instantiated, and when I see the newly created object I am not seeing these logging statements. I'm 100% positive that my application code is idle and is not instantiating these or any other new objects during this time period.

I've seen this with other classes in other projects as well and have always ignored it until now. Back to my original question, does "new" in the context of snapshots mean "instantiated" during these snapshots? From what I am seeing, it definitely does not mean this. How can I interpret this? If it doesn't mean instantiated, then what actually does it mean? Under what circumstances can this happen?

RE: WebDev.WebDev40.exe Crash on Start

james.billings — Fri, 10 May 2013 09:06:12 GMT

If it's crashing the webserver then we'll need to get some more information on that. Are there any messages in the Windows Event Log that may be relevant? Also, what happens if you try using IIS Express to host the site, any different? I guess we'll see how you get on with out-of-browser as in your other post!

RE: Cannot Profile SL5 App

james.billings — Fri, 10 May 2013 09:04:37 GMT

Hi thanks for your post- I assume you're trying "out of browser" due to the webdev40 problem you reported in another post?

That's likely to be a different issue, but this one may be caused by a security update issued by Microsoft. We have a workaround described in this article - can you try that?