ANTS Profiler™
User testimonials
"My trial with ANTS Profiler was excellent.
I had been pulling my hair out for three weeks with a performance issue and the Visual Studio / Team Suite Performance Tools couldn't handle it. They just kept blowing up on me. So, I tried ANTS Profiler. I installed it and found the problem in less than 30 minutes! After practically going insane for three weeks.
Outstanding tool. I love the thing."
"I have tried several other profilers, and ANTS Profiler is by far the easiest, most flexible, and fastest way to find bottlenecks in your code. We found three major performance improvements in one of our new applications within the first 10 minutes of using ANTS. Don't let the low price fool you. It's worth its weight in gold."
"Many software development teams, when faced with performance problems in their application, think they know what is causing the performance problems and spend vast amounts of time changing their code in an attempt to fix the problem. Quite often, major structural and architectural changes are made, which destabilize the application and require a massive retesting effort. This approach is risky, time consuming, and will rarely solve the performance problems at hand.
ANTS Profiler takes the guesswork out of performance analysis by providing a simple, easy-to-use interface to identify the real performance hotspots. Time and time again, the developer's intuition about what's slow was wrong, and the performance hotspots identified by ANTS Profiler are actually quite simple to resolve. For these reasons, I highly recommend the use of ANTS Profiler for .NET development teams of any size."
"Our company was looking for a tool to profile a medium-sized WinForms application. I had tried a few different open-source and commercial packages, and was getting a bit frustrated with the instability of these packages and the erroneous data some of them were reporting. I downloaded the ANTS Profiler expecting more of the same, but it blew my expectations out of the water. Its simple interface helped me to identify trouble spots in the code quickly, and the results were surprising: many of the hot spots were in places I would not have guessed without the tool's guidance.
In the end, we were able to improve performance in parts of the application up to 10x, and our customer noticed the results. A powerful, instantly understandable profiler. Highly recommended."
"My co-worker, Rob, and I have found great value in your ANTS Profiler application. We had one slight problem with it but Tom has been fantastic in resolving our issues. I am very impressed with your group's responsiveness and eagerness to help. Your group is top notch in my opinion."
"All the Red Gate products I used are a delight – SQL Bundle and ANTS Profiler. Simple to use, powerful, fast – awesome. I told some of our DBAs that they MUST use your products. If you are a DBA and reading this testimonial, and if you don't use Red Gate's software, trust me! You should. I have never written a testimonial before, but I felt compelled to do so in this case. I cannot stress strongly enough how wonderful this company's tools are. THANK YOU!"
"I used [ANTS Profiler] to increase performance on a personal application and, man, did it really work. I reduced the time of a process from 11 hours to 13 minutes."
"I had worked on a project for some time and, as it dated back to when I started working on ASP.NET, it wasn't the best designed piece of software. When we started to run into performance issues on the live production server we realized it was time to profile the application and identify where work was needed urgently!
After doing some research on different products, we initially tried a free VS.NET add-in which appeared to be able to do what we wanted. However, the problem we ran into very quickly, being new to application profiling, was that we couldn't do it. We returned to our search results and arrived at Red Gate again – we had already bought their SQL Compare product for a previous project, and I remembered how helpful they had been when I called them for advice on doing the database conversion at that time.
Once again, their online video demonstrations did the trick. During the video I saw exactly what I wanted to do, i.e. find the bits of my code that were performing poorly, and being able to zoom in directly to the offending code to start the fix. And then be able to re-profile it to see the results.
Within a morning I had found the main causes, re-coded certain methods and come to the conclusion that another third-party component was running slowly and would require a re-write of its API interface in our code. The help was excellent, walking me through the process but even so I found myself returning to the online video once or twice to get the "quick" help.
Once again, Red Gate has performed. The software was easy to learn and use with immediate help and tutorials to get me started when under pressure. The pre-sales staff were patient and knowledgeable in explaining the software and helping me select the correct product and, in the end, the software did the job well for me. Well done, Red Gate and thanks."
"I just want to tell you guys that ANTS is great. I was able to profile an ASP.NET program and an NUnit test suite with no problems. None of the other profilers that we tested was able to do either one of those tasks."
"Wow, I can't say enough about how impressed I was with Red Gate and the ANTS Profiler. I wanted to try out the ANTS Profiler prior to making my purchase decision so I took advantage of the free trial offer and downloaded the software. The next day I received an email about a new version of the Profiler that was being prepared for production release so I downloaded that version and started giving it a try. I found out quickly how easy it is to install and use the software.
I have tried most of the other profilers that are available for .NET but none of them compare with the ANTS Profiler. Within minutes I was analyzing my ASP.NET application. We have a very large ASP.NET VB and C# portal application with thousands of classes and screens/pages so profiling the application is no small effort. When I went to a certain page on my site, the ASP worker process crashed. I was able to recreate the problem, so I posted a message in the support forum and, shortly thereafter, received a phone call from one of the Profiler developers. Remember, I'm just 'trying' the software, but Tom Harris from Red Gate was incredibly helpful, and within an hour or two he had determined the problem, put a fix into the profiler, and sent me a new version of the software which worked flawlessly. I went on to profile our application for about 15 minutes which, in turn, captured profile data for over 1,900 methods without any problems. Considering I was not a licensed customer, this tells me a lot about how these guys truly care about the quality of their products, and helping their customers make use of these tools."
"The ANTS Profiler is an essential part of every .NET developer's tool belt. It has saved our teams countless hours of fumbling around in the dark, chasing performance and capacity problems. Its ability to handle web applications, along with other project types, is especially nice."
"I'm telling you, this is an awesome product. First off, I had the chance to test the product against some very process intensive, multithreaded applications, one of which downloads and parses dozens of web pages simultaneously. I never experienced any problems through the experience with either the performance or memory profilers. The memory profiler is intuitive and easy to understand; the stack-trace and source code is also very helpful for keeping track of objects. I could easily identify which objects were persisting as opposed to those that had been garbage collected by using and comparing the snapshot reports.
The added ability to snapshot the performance profiling makes the process so much simpler than in Version 1, because I no longer have to stop the process to view the profiling results. Being able to take multiple performance snapshots at certain points during the program execution is a tremendous benefit. Great product, it's been extremely useful and saved me hours of tracking down issues."
"Following our initial evaluation of ANTS Profiler we have purchased one license, and have already used it to identify several bottlenecks in our code and to speed up our applications, in particular resolving several performance issues in time for implementation on a client site. May I congratulate you on bringing us yet another time-saving utility – in addition to ANTS Profiler, we have a license for SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare, which I requested to help me compare QA releases of a database with the current dev release before we roll out an application version into QA. Without it, the release would take all day. With it, it takes a couple of hours."
"I had a look at your ANTS Profiler – it's magic!"
"I love the ANTS Profiler. It's simple and the reports make it a picnic to home in on problem spots. I just browse for those bar graphs in the code listing and proceed to attack the code."
"I found the product very straightforward to use, and I appreciate the fact that one can use it right away without a steep learning curve. I don't profile my code very often, but every once in a while I do so in order to figure out what is going on. I intend to buy one copy in order to have it on hand when I need it."
"We ran Profiler across our newest web service to identify performance bottlenecks. It identified 3 lines of code that took 80% of the time. They were all XPath queries, which in isolation take no time, but with each of these executed over 800 times for our simulation, the tool showed these lines for the evilness that they were. Thanks to this tool, the simulation execution reduced from 300 sec to 40–50 sec, and we have now also bought a 5-user license."
"...I'd have never found the bottleneck...nor would I have even suspected its existence...were it not for your software. And it was so simple to use! I simply directed ANTS to run the program, and voilà! Your software gave me back a drill-down report – complete with all of my code – that even an idiot could understand, it was so intuitive.
It's the coolest and most useful software I've seen in ages! It is exactly what the average .NET programmer needs. Unbelievably easy to use and right to the point of what is necessary in a profiler. I don't know how you did it. Thank you very much."
"Your ANTS Profiler is a fantastic product. It is one of the very few applications that really does run 'out of the box'. I was profiling the library in question within minutes of installing your Profiler. I have already recommended it to others and received favorable feedback. I will definitely be adding this tool to my development suite in due course."
"ANTS Profiler is an asset to any developer's tool set. The ability to pinpoint weak lines in code quickly and reliably helps developers build better applications."
"ANTS Profiler is much simpler to use than other .NET profilers that we have evaluated. It gives you the information that you need to make educated optimization decisions without distracting you with features that might never be used. With its ease-of-use and friendly pricing model, ANTS Profiler has already proven to be a great investment for us."
"This is one of the most useful tools I have ever used. I just bought a 5-pack for my development team."
"Your ANTS Profiler paid for itself in the first 10 minutes after downloading and installing. I had a performance problem, but I didn't know where it was: the first run of the profiler showed me exactly where it was. Subsequent runs showed me where I could focus my performance boosting work. I had looked around before trying ANTS free download and the ability to get the job done rapidly was a key discriminator: the ANTS Profiler delivered the goods. This is not a tool that gets in your way: I had the results, without reading documentation, within minutes! This is an invaluable tool to have in your programming tool chest."
"We were experiencing a number of different performance problems, so we downloaded ANTS Profiler to find out more. Five minutes after installing the evaluation of ANTS Profiler, we had discovered our first performance leak. ANTS Profiler is designed to make the whole profiling process easy. After one day, it had helped us to redesign a complete user scenario."
"ANTS Profiler Professional (V3.0) provides memory usage information in a clear, concise and accurate way that demonstrated to us exactly how the memory in our enterprise windows form application was being used. The analytical and graphical information allowed us to tune the application for greater performance in a relatively short period of time.
Without a memory profiling tool like ANTS Profiler, this accomplishment would not have been possible. The end result is an application that uses memory in a far more effective way leading to much greater customer satisfaction. A minimal learning curve is needed to become effective with this intuitive tool. We learned that just because an application is developed in a managed memory application such as .Net C#, memory usage still has to be evaluated and verified to be sure it is being used correctly."
"I would recommend Chris to anyone wishing to work with the Red-Gate ANTS software sales team. Issues were addressed quickly and to my complete satisfaction. His helpfulness and courtesy made the Red-Gate software purchase experience a pleasure."
"We are used to bad product support stories, so I would like bring a different one that impressed me in a positive way. A few days ago I purchased ANTS performance profiler from Red-Gate. The profiler looked very good and handy, but when I ran it on my Dell notebook, timing in report were all wrong: they showed millions of seconds instead of small values.
I was quite disappointed that the profiler did not work on my notebook, because it's my main work horse. I wrote a mail to Red-Gate support, and they took it very seriously. I was getting several emails a day with requests to try different things. Eventually, they managed to find not even one, but two, issues that may occur on some notebooks:
1. Multiple processor PCs with power management features may require a hot fix for applications that require high performance (e.g. games and profilers). The fix is available from Microsoft.
2. Certain notebooks use a feature called SpeedStep to optimize battery lifetime. Having this feature enabled may distort profilers' time computation.
I applied a hot fix, disabled SpeedStep and ANTS Profiler's reports got back to normal. Red Gate promised that their next version should have a workaround that would not require disabling SpeedStep.
This investigation took several days, and I must say I am very pleased with the amount of attention Red Gate team paid to this issue. So I decided to share this story with you guys. And no, I don't have any relationship to Red Gate except being their customer."
"Just dropping you a note of thanks for the ANTS Profiler. We have found it invaluable in our performance tuning tasks for our custom .NET applications and components/controls. The recent integration into the Visual Studio 2003/2005 IDE environments makes the product, already a winner, even better.
ANTS Profiler has saved me and my company countless amounts of time over the years and most definitely performs better than advertised. To anyone on the fence I would say run, don't walk and buy it."
"Within four hours of downloading and installing ANTS Profiler, we've managed to cut about 30% of the execution time of a print function that was taking too long to complete. I can't see how we would have found the bottleneck as fast without the clues provided by ANTS Profiler performance profiling.
ANTS Profiler helped us take away 30% of time spent in that particular function. In time units, we're talking about a 0.2 sec gain, which is kind of nice for a routine that is called once for every ticket that is printed in an app used to sell tickets for arenas with up to 20k seats."
"The software installed fine and I had no problems with the trial license, putting it ahead of the other products I tried, but I couldn't figure out how to profile a DLL. So I contacted support. Although I'm in the States and they are in the UK, I had a response the next morning and found the problem in my code shortly thereafter. What really impressed me was that the technical support rep who could have answered my question was tied up in a meeting, so rather than making me wait longer, one of the developers responded to me directly with the information I needed.
One of the other products I looked at seemed very promising, but after having problems with the installation and contacting support, I didn't get a response for more than a day, and then after sending them the information they requested, it was another day before I heard back (still without a solution). By that time, I was already using ANTS successfully and was so pleased with the service I had gotten, I gave up on the other product and purchased ANTS."
"I've spent the last week turning a 3-hour process in our application, into a 10-minute one, by using ANTS Profiler to identify where we can cache data!
I was working on the design of an online Job Evaluation application, consisting of a series of questionnaires used to score and grade positions (which ultimately feeds into a pay modelling application). The scoring and grading is done by VB.NET scripts written by our implementors (not our developers), which we dynamically load and compile and then execute for each job in the system. There are typically tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of jobs, and the data is normalised into Job, Question and Answer tables (e.g. the answers table contains a row per job, per question).
Grading several thousands of positions was taking around 3 hours when we started, so we ran the profiler over it. Through a combination of pre-fetching data (as opposed to lazy-loading) and caching records that never changed in memory (so we weren't hitting the database quite so much), we've got this down to about 10 minutes."
"I have just purchased the Pro version of the product. While so far I have only used the performance profiler, I found it to be very easy to use, and within minutes I found two specific areas of my program that were causing significant performance issues. These were small methods that were being called many times – I would never have thought to look at these methods if I had not used ANTS Profiler. Within a few hours, I was able to make changes which reduced the time it took to run the program by two-thirds."
"I downloaded the trial for ANTS Profiler and ran it over some VB.Net and ASP.Net applications (some current, some old).
I was quite amazed at how many potential bottlenecks were brought to my attention. I knew that some of my db tables needed tuning, but the profiler showed all the functions that were causing an overhead, pointing me in the right direction as to which tables needed work on them, before releasing the application to clients.
There were numerous other places within the applications that were immediately highlighted by the profiler with the execution time for each problematic line (or lines) of code. It was incredibly easy to sort the procedures by execution time and see exactly where you should spend most time improving them."
"Recently we came across a memory problem in our software, and I wanted to test the waters to see what profiling products were out there. I downloaded ANTS Profiler and my problem was solved in 15 minutes.
It's refreshing you obviously took the approach of, 'While a developer could figure out convoluted and obscure buttons and switches, they shouldn't have to. Our products need to be simple so they stay out of people's way so they can get their stuff done.' After all, we don't really want to be using your profiler product. We'd rather our own product just worked! So it's refreshing you've designed your products, their UIs and so forth, so they don't get in the way, they just help us get our stuff done and make our products work."
