ANTS Performance Profiler 8

Improve application performance: profile .NET code and database calls

Download ANTS Performance Profiler

Testimonials

I have had a performance issue for a few days now and tried to pinpoint the cause using my brain and simple debugging tools. I made the purchase for ANTS and within 30 minutes, including installation of the license key, had the issue identified and fixed!
Martin Altenstedt, InHill Software

I don't know how I ever developed enterprise software without the ANTS profilers. They have saved me weeks of effort and paid for themselves many times over. Fantastic products!
Gerhard du Toit, KIT Limited

ANTS Performance Profiler is an incredible, seriously awesome product. A great little tool for finding out what parts of your code take the most time/resources. I have spent countless hours in debugging garbage collection issues, where I had no idea where I was heading. This tool showed me a systematic approach to debug web based application and find memory leak. Any issue that I was debugging for months was resolved in matter of days. Thank you Red Gate!
Mayuresh Sawardekar

I didn't need your help getting started with ANTS because the short introductory notes got me straight into it. I found the performance bottleneck I was looking for in about 5 minutes. ANTS Performance Profiler has been one of the best developer tools I've used in years. The performance and the user experience stand out.
Bruce Belson, Director, Planatech Solutions Ltd

The number one rule of profiling: the bottleneck is NEVER where you thought it was.
Jeremy Jarrell, Software Developer, Matrix Solutions

We have been using ANTS profiler since the early versions, and have to say that your commitment to improving and developing the product is second to none.

We use ANTS Profiler to help us improve performance across our application, and with something in the region of 1,000,000 lines of code, it proves to be very useful, we have standard test set-up which we then run the tool against after changes so we can see if changes have effected performance.

The tool allows us to spot obvious problems in seconds, a tool we just could not live without. The new version is a huge improvement, and the time-lining really helps.
Richard Chivers – CTO – Contensis Web Content Management

The profiler allowed us to precisely identify critical bottlenecks in our system, that has resulted in an absolutely staggering performance increase! As an example c# object validation code that previously took 4 seconds now takes 0.02 secs. Thats a 200 fold increase :)

800 dollars is really a small price to pay and gave us a big ROI. Thank you Red Gate!
Allan Rasmussen, Technical Software Engineering

Over the weekend, we rolled out a few speed improvements to the Stack Overflow engine. First, we did a quick pass with ANTS Profiler and identified a few places where redundant or unnecessary database queries slipped into our code. We like to do this every few months on common pages as a sanity check.
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Jeff Atwood, Stack Overflow

ANTS Performance Profiler was an answer to our prayers. We were developing a high-performance "comet" library for IIS, but the throughput was nowhere near where we wanted it to be. The profiler gave us the insight necessary to locate bottlenecks, trim fatty code, and turn our application into a well-oiled machine.

We wrote our own custom JSON parser to replace the third-party library whose performance was not up to par. Many potential threading enhancements were discovered and implemented. Details on HTTP request and response times showed us where to improve near our application boundaries. All in all, we went from 5000 messages a second to well over 25000 in our test

We tried several performance profilers, and ANTS was the only one that gave us the level of detail and accuracy we needed to get serious results.
Anton Jerod Venema, Frozen Mountain Software

We checked out the evaluation version amongst the team and were very happy with it. The software helped us drastically improve performance in our telemedicine application that we have distributed out to rural locations in Alaska, Greenland, and other extremely remote places. Thanks to the tooling that you provided, we were able to discover a performance hit in our serialization of XML that was fixed for a 10x performance increase. As soon as we saw how effective and easy it was to use, we demanded full licenses for the entire team so that we could continue to improve our software performance as we move forward.
Garret Spargo, Product Manager - AFHCAN

ANTS Profiler took me down to which methods and which lines were taking the time. We now get through the full 9 million rows in 2 to 3 days – at least 5 times faster!
Ryan Garaygay, LWSMedia

ANTS Profiler saved me half a day's work already after looking in the wrong place for a method that was causing my app to slow down terribly!
Stefan Perkins, Development Analyst, Mitrefinch LTD

Going on my seventh year as a development manager for .NET teams, I've been using ANTS Profiler since its 1.0 release and it has time and again proven to be absolutely indispensable for any .NET developer. ANTS Profiler 4.0 marks the best release yet, with unparalleled usability and the most in-depth profiling capability of any system on the market. No production .NET software should ever be released without being reviewed in ANTS Profiler – it's just that good.

Really, I love it. You guys have done great work and without it I wouldn't even have known who you were.
Matt Lavallee, Director of Technology, MLS Property Information Network, Inc.

The interactive timeline gives you an immediate picture of what's going on.
Brannon King, Autonomous Solutions Inc

I can interact with it while it's still profiling and start investigating performance data pretty much straight away.
Paul Usher, Lead Developer, Impact Homes Pty Ltd

With most profiling software, my application runs so slowly that it's barely usable but, with ANTS Profiler 4, even when it's collecting line-level timings, the overhead was hardly noticeable.
Geoff Hirst, Consultant, 64Bitz Computer Consultancy Ltd and VBUG editor

The low overhead means it has minimal impact on the execution of my program.
Mark Everest, Development Team Leader, Renault F1 Team Ltd

We had some reports in our appointment scheduling module which took as long as 5 minutes to fully load. We used ANTS Profiler to find the bottlenecks. After fixing the problems, those reports loaded in under 30 seconds! That's a 1000% improvement in response time. ANTS Profiler saved us weeks of tweaking code that really didn't need it. It took us straight to the specific areas of our code which were the cause of our performance issues.
Terry Phillips, Sr Developer, Harley-Davidson Dealer Systems

I was using ANTS Profiler to profile an app of ours and it was a real joy to use. The new UI goes well beyond intuitive and does all of the hard work for me!
Brian Genisio, Sr. Software Engineer, Ann Arbor MI

ANTS Profiler delves right into the code and identifies laggy and non-optimal sections so you can easily find them and write them better. We've been using IQueryable a lot lately, being the hottest new thing on the LINQ scene, but it was creating some major hold ups on our busier sites. In less than an hour, using the ANTS Profiler cut request times down by as much as 80% in some extreme cases. We just kept re-analysing the code until everything was satisfactory. What an eye-opener!
Timothy Hustler, Web Developer, Creative Jar Ltd

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.
Rich Mershon, CTO, BlackRock Technologies

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.
Scott Fletcher, SVI Healthcare

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.
Derek Mitchell, Senior Consultant, ThoughtCorp Inc.

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.
Dan Ports, Lead Developer, Intrigma Inc.

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.
David Anderson, Manager, Marketing Technologies, ING Groep N.V.

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!
Doron Grinstein, Technical Director, Information Technology, Walt Disney Studios

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.
Eduardo Fonseca B., Lidersoft

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.
Brian Furlong, Software Developer, Crosswins Services Limited

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.
David Scheidt, Developer – Application Systems

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.
Ed Lorenz, Software Architect, EDS

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.
Jeff Pek, Software Engineer, Autodesk

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.
Chris Crabtree, InfoSquire

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.
Emma-Jane Faulkner, Analyst Programmer, Compass Software (UK) Limited

I had a look at your ANTS Profiler – it's magic!
Pieter Grobler, Alkon (Pty) Ltd, South Africa

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.
Bob Hall, One Lambda, Inc.

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.
Corey Kosak, Senior Software Engineer

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.
Robert Slaney, SEEK Limited

...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.
Mike Samuels, professional programmer for over 25 years

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.
James Hebben, Managing Director, Extraview Ltd

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.
Prashant Sridharan, Lead Product Manager for the Developer and Platform Evangelism Division, Microsoft Corp.

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.
Joshua Gall, Vice President of Microsoft Technologies, Digital Visions Inc.

This is one of the most useful tools I have ever used. I just bought a 5-pack for my development team.
Ron Dombrowski, Intergis

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.
David Takahashi, Group 1 Software (Pitney Bowes)

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.
Doron B., Chief Architect, Bsor Projects

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.
Paul Whewell, Manager Applications Development, Regional Income Tax Agency, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A

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.
Vagif Abilov, Chief System Architect, Contopronto AS

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.
Lonnie Allen Watson, Chief Technology Officer, Tidgewell Associates, Inc.

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.
Ulf Lundgren, Chief Technology Officer, Transticket

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.

Elizabeth Shulok, President, Structural Integrators, LLC

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.
Danny Tuppeny, Software Engineer, Link HR (a division of Northgate HR)

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.
Vic Bertolozzi, Melaneus Premier Financial Systems, LLC

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.
Jules Wensley, Postcode & Systems Ltd

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.
Corey Young, InfoSquire