The Early Access Program for ANTS Performance Profiler 6 has begun. You can get the new version from the EAP forum, here.

There are three major new features in this early build, with more to come in the future:

Sampling

This new profiling mode is available from the session setup dialog. Sampling works by periodically taking snapshots of the target program’s state and using statistics to estimate the amount of time spent in each method.

This mode is very much faster than instrumentation and is less prone to biasing the results. However, it records much less detail as it is unable to see events that occur in much less than 10 milliseconds, so it is most suited for obtaining a performance overview of an application.

‘Method events’

Previous versions of the profiler have focussed on finding out how long a method takes to execute. This new feature makes it possible to also find out when a method was running: simply click on a method in the call tree or all methods grid and the time it was running will be highlighted on the timeline.

Command line tool

We’ve added a new command line tool to this version of the profiler. This makes it possible to profile applications and generate reports without using the UI. The intention is that this tool will be used in situations where profiling needs to be automated, for example as part of a continuous integration build process.