How to find performance issues with ANTS Performance Profiler in five steps

Step 1: Choose the type of application you want to profile

• Choose the type of application you want to profile.
• Enter either the file path or URL for your application.
• Choose the level of detail you'd like to see, e.g. line-level timings.
• Click 'Start Profiling'

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Step 2: Interact with your app as normal

• ANTS Performance Profiler automatically launches your application.
• As you interact with it, you will notice a red line appearing on the timeline. This is your application's CPU usage.

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Step 3: Select a region you want to inspect

• Select the area of interest – usually one with high CPU usage – on the timeline.
• ANTS Performance Profiler will display all the methods and database queries that ran during this time, including timing data for each method and query.
• If you select a particular method, ANTS Performance Profiler will show you the line-level timings for each line of code in that method, so you can jump to the slowest line.

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Step 4: Take a look at the SQL

• If you click on the orange 'SQL' icon, ANTS Performance Profiler will give you more detail on your query performance.
• You can see the text of the query, the total time to first result, average time, and hit count.

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Step 5: Dig deeper into code and queries

• Clicking on the .NET icon will then take you back to the code, so you can see what method caused that query to run.
• By flicking between .NET and SQL, you can soon find out if it's the code or the database that's slowing you down.
• In this case, it was the NearestDinners method, called by the SearchByLocation method that caused the slowdown rather than the SQL query.

More detail, including a demo application, is available in our full ANTS Performance Profiler walkthrough.