ANTS Profiler^™

The latest version of ANTS Profiler is 4.1. If you are a new user, you can download it for free, and try it for 14 days. If you are a current customer, you can upgrade to the latest version, by performing a Check for updates from the Help menu of the program.

To find out how much it will cost to upgrade to the latest version, please see our page about upgrading.

ANTS Profiler 3.xx and 4.0 can run side by side without any problem. You can have a 14-day free trial of ANTS Profiler 4.0, even if the trial for 3.xx has expired. However, version 4 will not coexist well with version 1.xx on the same machine. If you need to return to a 1.xx version of the tool, this is possible. Please contact us for further information.

Again, this is possible. Please contact us for further information.

Visit the relevant licensing page on this website, to read full license details.

When you profile your application, you may find that ANTS Profiler does not display your source code. This generally happens because either the PDB file associated with your assembly is not present or, more commonly, the source code location does not match the references to the debug locations in the PDB file. ANTS Profiler 4 gives you the option of manually locating source code, and will also find other source files in the same location.

The timeline can be used to focus in on performance data for a particular time period. Just click and drag over the region of interest, and ANTS Profiler will show you performance data for that time period. You can zoom in and out using the mouse wheel, or the buttons to the right of the timeline.

The tree view shows stack traces through your application, along with timings for each method in the stack trace. The "Time with children" column shows how long a method takes to execute, including all the time taken up by the methods it calls, the methods they call, etc. The "Hot" indicators simply show the hottest, i.e. most expensive call stack through your application code for the selected time period. You'll see that they correspond to the stack trace with the highest values for "Time with children". The hottest path is generally a good place to start looking at optimising your code.

The summary view is no more. It is an ex-summary view. However, we haven't done away with the information, we just present in a format that is hopefully more useful. The slowest methods, for example, can be investigated by either (i) looking at the hottest path in the tree view, or (ii) sorting by the "Time" or "Time with children" columns in the methods grid. Generally we'd suggest that you select the time period you're interested in on the timeline in order to reduce the amount of information being displayed. There is no direct mapping of functionality for the slowest lines of code in your application, however we do show the slowest lines in each source file by highlighting them in red on the heat map to the right of the source view. You can click on these methods to go to the line in question.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that ANTS Profiler 4 is more accurate than ANTS Profiler 3, and is better at removing its own overhead from calculated timings. The second is that ANTS Profiler 3 used to show wall clock times, which include all blocking for I/O, thread sleeps etc., whereas ANTS Profiler 4 shows CPU times by default, which do not include any blocking. You can switch between wall clock and CPU time at any time using the display options bar below the tree view, methods grid, or call graph.

No. It will show you when managed code calls into unmanaged code, and will tell you overall how long that call took, but it can't provide detailed information for unmanaged code, and will not provide any information for purely unmanaged applications.

WCF is simply a library that can be used by various types of application. For example you could have a desktop, or ASP.NET client, using WCF to communicate with a Windows Service server. WCF can also be used to create peer-to-peer applications. You should profile the appropriate application type for your client or server, or for your peer application(s). You can profile both client and server at the same time by starting up two separate instances of ANTS Profiler 4, one to profile the server, the other to profile the client.

Yes. Setup instructions can be found right here.

At present no. SQL Server 2005 and 2008 lock down the CLR pretty tightly to ensure that rogue .NET code can't take down SQL Server. One of the things that's locked out is the profiling API, and at the time of writing we haven't found a way around this.

Unfortunately you need to use run as administrator to profile Web Development Server applications on Vista and Windows Server 2008, however if you do this you should experience no problems. Just right-click on the Memory Profile executable, open its Properties and set it to always run as administrator.