ANTS Performance Profiler 7.0

Why one .NET vendor relies on another for finding critical performance bottlenecks

Daniel Jebaraj
VP of Engineering, Syncfusion

It's not often you see one .NET product vendor recommend another's tools. Especially when it's a company such as Syncfusion, which has made the SD Times 100 list for five straight years and describes its QA process as "almost brutal."

That's what makes Syncfusion's recommendation of Red Gate's ANTS Performance Profiler particularly credible.

"We do most of our tuning ourselves, using our own instrumentation," says Daniel Jebaraj, vice president of engineering for Syncfusion. "In about 80 percent of the cases, we can find the bottlenecks through intuition and experience with our products. But it's that 20 percent – where things look normal, but you can't figure out what's going on – that can cost you a lot of time and money."

Normally those 20 percent of cases involve one or two scenarios critical to Syncfusion's business:

1. Troubleshooting for sample applications provided by customers, where Syncfusion developers don't have the luxury of using their own instruction code.
2. What Jebaraj calls "head-scratching" cases, when it is difficult to figure out where the bottlenecks are taking place.

In those cases that could result in major time and resource sinks, Syncfusion turns to ANTS Performance Profiler. Jebaraj says that Syncfusion uses ANTS for three reasons:

• It visually represents performance bottlenecks in ways that are easy for developers to understand.
• Unlike other profilers, it requires very little overhead, making the results more reliable and consistent.
• It supports the myriad .NET technologies – including ASP.NET, C# code, and VB.NET applications – on which Syncfusion develops.

But technical reasons aside, in the end it all comes down to pleasing customers:

"We're dedicated to delivering real business innovation, and performance is a big component in that equation," says Jebaraj. "When a bottleneck occurs, it's not just our time and money, but our customers' too. We don't want to keep our business partners waiting for a solution."