Why you should own a code profiling tool
Introduction Every professional developer, whether developing web applications or desktop applications, needs his or her code to run quickly and efficiently. The big question, however, is: How do you ensure that your code is quick and efficient? You could try manual trial and error, but you risk spending hours, days, and sometimes weeks blindly chasing performance issues. Since bottlenecks are rarely in the obvious place, tuning your code without being certain that it is indeed being called, and that it is the cause of an issue, would be pointless. Why you should invest in a code profiler Stop guessing – use real dataA code profiling tool takes the guesswork out of optimizing code. It can provide quantitative data, such as code timings and hit counts, allowing you to stop guessing and zero in on key issues. Instead of spending time locating the bottlenecks, you can now use your time effectively and obliterate bottlenecks, while those around you are still hunting for them. A code profiler analyzes your code in minutes, and the results allow you to:
You may have just joined a company, or you may not have worked on a particular application, and you are being asked to look into somebody else's code, perhaps your predecessor's. Examining someone else's code when you are not familiar with it is a difficult job. A code profiler that can analyze the code for you before you get stuck in will allow you to gain a better understanding of the application structure and how the code runs. In cases where you do develop the application yourself, understanding how your code behaves, where each piece of code is being called from, whether it goes into unnecessary loops, and so on, gives you immense knowledge and power. It means that you can fix any issues before shipping, rather than waiting for your customers to report problems. Doing this allows you to release resilient applications and code that you can be proud of.
Reducing the amount of time it takes to find bottlenecks means you can get on with the work of fixing inefficient algorithms, eliminating the bottlenecks, and achieving the results you want, faster.
Queueing theory tells us that the maximum throughput in a system is limited by the component with the lowest throughput. So, to improve the system's performance, you only need to improve the performance of the component with the lowest throughput. It's so much easier to make an algorithm run more efficiently when you know exactly where to focus your performance-boosting work. Keep an audit trail of code changes and performance improvementsAside from the essential arguments listed above, code profiling throughout the development cycle allows you to keep an audit trail of performance improvements made over time. As your application changes and grows in size and quality, managers generally like to have a means of monitoring the code at intervals throughout the development cycle. They want to know that performance trends are moving in the right direction and that applications aren't becoming unnecessarily complex and unstructured. The only way to keep track of this is to profile your code after each critical milestone. Efficient testing, as part of an effective quality-assurance effortAny significantly-sized piece of software contains bottlenecks, just as it will contain bugs. It's inevitable; it's part of the job. What's avoidable, however, is wasting unnecessary time looking for, and fixing, bottlenecks and bugs. Furthermore, the earlier you find and fix a bottleneck or a bug, the cheaper it is to fix. An industry rule of thumb is that a bug that costs $100 to fix before shipping can cost $1,000 to fix after shipping. Looking for a bug and fixing it two weeks after it was introduced is going to be much easier than finding and fixing a bug that was introduced two months ago. For one thing, the "surface area" of changes in that period is going to be smaller, and the code will be fresher in your mind. This is why using a code profiler after each milestone is vital. It will save you hours, days, and sometimes weeks when you are pressed for time, later down the line. You will sometimes have to rewrite large amounts of code, or code which you thought was stable, after discovering that parts of it do not perform as well as expected. Then, of course, once the code has been rewritten and tested, something else might break and need fixing. Testing for bottlenecks and bugs late in the development process leaves you very little time to fix issues and, where it is deemed too risky to drastically optimize code at a late stage, it greatly increases the likelihood of a poorly-performing application being released. This would reflect badly on you, your team, and your department. And yet it is so easy to minimize risks, simply by profiling your .NET code regularly during the development phase, after each critical milestone. The time, money, and stress it saves you down the line are always worth it. Using a code profiler for quality assurance during your development phase will allow you to measure the quality of your software and make sure that you reach a given performance standard. It allows QA managers and software managers to streamline test plans and allocate most of the time and resources to the most critical part of the code (saving on excessive time spent on areas of the program where the risk of defects is low). Make better design choicesIf used early on during the development phase, a profiling tool can also help you make design choices, based on the profiling results. You can compare the performance of different approaches, and make sure your application is scalable early on in the project, avoiding costly problems later on. Reduce hardware costsUsing a code profiler puts you in control of your code and your infrastructure. A profiler will pinpoint areas of your code that need tuning and will allow you to squeeze more performance out of your servers; you may not need to add an extra gigabyte of RAM or get a quad core CPU, rather than a dual core CPU. Your existing servers can be pushed further and serve more requests concurrently. So, by using a code profiler throughout the development process, and optimizing performance of your application, you will be better able to assess hardware requirements and, potentially, reduce hardware costs.
Why choose ANTS Performance Profiler™ Whether you are developing in C#, VB.NET, or managed C++, you will be looking for optimum performance from your code. ANTS Performance Profiler identifies performance bottlenecks in applications written in any of the languages available on the .NET Framework. During performance profiling, ANTS Performance Profiler records the frequency and time it takes for each line of code to be executed, as you are using your application. ANTS Performance Profiler provides you with detailed quantitative data, including line-level timings, and hit counts. These detailed results allow you to quickly identify performance bottlenecks and optimize your .NET application accordingly.
Source code view: ANTS Performance Profiler provides you with detailed profiling results, including line-level timing, so you can drill down to the specific lines of code responsible for performance inefficiencies. ANTS Performance Profiler's main strengths
The call tree is dynamically updated to match the selection on the timeline – ideal if you want to narrow down the amount of information you get. Key Features
The timeline allows you to select a region of activity and view the data just for that region. In this way, you won't be swamped with information when you are only interested in a particular spike in resource usage, or a specific event.
You can filter the amount of data that gets returned by selecting a specific region of activity on the timeline.
ANTS Performance Profiler offers clear, detailed profiling results, with line-level timing, so you can quickly identify the specific lines of code which are affecting the performance of your application.
The call tree underneath the timeline displays the profiling results almost instantaneously after selecting a region on the timeline, and takes you straight to the heart of a performance issue.
You can create a call graph focused on any method of your choice, and visualize all the callers and callees for that method, and their contribution to its execution time.
Conclusion If you work on complex applications and often find yourself spending days chasing performance problems, then you might want to consider ANTS Performance Profiler. Not only will you save hours of work when problems do arise but, if you carry out performance analysis at each milestone during your development cycle, you will inevitably produce better-quality code without the risk of incurring major performance issues at a late stage of development. "I was able to speed up my app by about 80-fold within the first hour of the trial." "We were able to improve performance in parts of the application up to 10 times, and our customer noticed the results. A powerful, instantly understandable profiler. Highly recommended" Try out ANTS Performance Profiler now and see for yourself how it could help you boost the performance of your .NET program.
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