Product Review: ANTS Profiler 2.7
Anand Narayanaswamy
Published: September 29, 2006

Testing the performance of a .NET application is crucial to its successful deployment. It will help you to analyze those portions of code which loads slower along with many other factors. Hence, you can rectify the flaws in the code if any before the deployment of the application. For this purpose, a good software tool is required. ANTS Profiler 2.7 is an excellent tool which quickly and easily pinpoints performance bottlenecks in applications written in any of the languages available on the .NET Framework.

A trial version of the product can be downloaded from the website of the vendor. You can use it free of cost for 14 days. The installation file is around 7 MB in size and I downloaded it within 5-10 minutes using a Broadband Internet Connection. Once the product is downloaded, it should be properly installed and the whole process doesn’t take less than 5 minutes. I tested the product using a Pentium 4 machine with 512 MB of RAM.

The main feature of the product is that it profiles nearly all .NET Framework 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 applications including Windows applications, ASP.NET web applications, COM+ applications and .NET Windows services in addition to profiling application memory. The product also optimizes the code very effectively and will identify slow-loading pages and, more importantly, tell you why they are slow. ANTS Profiler identifies slow methods in your code and find out which third-party libraries are holding you back. From my point of view, the product is of great use and it analyzes the individual lines of code that are executing slow. The product profiles any .NET Framework language such as C#, Visual Basic .NET, Managed C++ and even COBOL .NET. Moreover, the product is very simple to use for any level of programmer. ANTS Profiler also fully supports projects developed using Visual Studio 2005.

An interesting point to note is that you can work with the application normally while running ANTS Profiler in the background. The product then records the frequency and time spent in each line of your code, as you are using your application. A summary shows you the slowest code and methods, allowing you to quickly optimize your applications.

The timings for recursive methods are accurate in the version 2.7 of the product. Prior to 2.7, these methods had a tendency to grow alarmingly. ANTS Profiler 2.7 has been completely built with .NET Framework 2.0 and therefore the product is completely compatible with Windows Vista. I however didn't tested this feature. Hence, if you use Windows Vista RC1 then just give the product a try and check out the vendor's claim.

The vendor has fixed a bug with profiling ASP.NET on machines that have both .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 installed. One of the interesting features of the product is that you need not have to stop the web server to profile a web site when profiling ASP.NET on Windows 2003 Server. The vendor has fixed the crashing of profiler due to the nature of some multithreaded applications. With the help of version 2.7, you can report problems directly to the support team from within the user interface of the product.

The Project Profiler Wizard will be launched (see Figure 1) as soon as you complete the installation process if you had chosen to start the program. You can also manually start it from Start | All Programs | ANTS | ANTS Profiler.

Figure 1

The next step is to pick a type of application from the wizard. For the purpose of this review, I have chosen to profile an ASP.NET web application.

Figure 2

The wizard will automatically prompt you to select an application. By default, it lists all those valid ASP.NET web applications. I was unable to see my concerned web application when I browsed through the list as shown in Figure 3. But I realized that the wizard will populate only those projects which are created as an application using Internet Information Services (IIS). I then navigated to the control panel and performed the appropriate task and then refreshed the wizard. It would be great if the vendor specifies this piece of information on the wizard so that beginners can be able to use the program without any problems.

Figure 3

As soon as you click the Next button, the wizard will ask you to choose the type of code which has to be profiled as shown in Figure 4

Figure 4

As you can see from the above figure, I have chosen to profile all methods including .NET Framework assemblies. The wizard will automatically perform the required actions such as starting and stopping of various services such as SMTP and IIS upon clicking the Finish button from the Wizard dialog.

ANTS Profiler will make an attempt to launch the application and the output will be displayed. After you close the browser window, the profiler will display a report which contains detailed information about the different namespaces, the relevant method names in addition to the time and other related factors.

You can save the results generated by the product in *.profiler format. ANTS Profiler comes with a detailed documentation and it can be accessed from the Help menu from the home page of the product. It can also be separately downloaded from the website of the vendor. The vendor also maintains a support forum exclusively for the product. I would suggest you to post any questions which you may have regarding the product on the forum so that it will benefit other users as well. The answers are posted directly by one of the product team personnel.

I am not aware about any other product which can beat ANTS Profiler. I must say that the product is an excellent tool to analyze a .NET Framework application deeply before is delivery. The product will surely pay rich dividends for your application in long run if used effectively. Hence, the next time when you venture to test the performance of your application, be sure to test drive ANTS Profiler and you will ultimately experience the difference.
 
Rating: ****
Product: ANTS Profiler 2.7
Vendor: Red Gate Software Ltd
Web Site: http://www.red-gate.com 
Price: US$295 (14 days free trial available)