As so many of us know, Red-Gate has some really awesome database tools.  The Compare and Data Compare tools are totally awesome and I don’t know how I’d do many of the things I do without those tools.  Well, I know how I’d do them.  The same way I used to.  But never again will I work with databases between servers without the help of these tools.

But I’m here to tell you about my experience with ANTS (Advanced .Net Tool Suite) Profiler.  I've been using this tool for a very short while and am absolutely thrilled with it.

Now I’m not going to provide screenshots and all that jazz for ya.  I’m going to let you go to Red-Gate’s website and see that stuff for yourself.  Instead, I want to point out a couple of very awesome items.

Talking about the performance profiler:

1.  On the summary page, right when you take a snapshot of the the performance profile, it tells you the slowest 10 lines of code that have executed to that point.  Click on one, and down in the bottom it shows you the source of that line of code, points you to the line, and has a little “time to execute” bar graph out to the side.

2.  Right underneath the slowest lines of code are the slowest methods to execute with the same type of information.

3.  Under the all methods tab, you can see each method that has executed, what namespace in executed in, the time to execute, hit count, source file and each of those columns can be sorted and the namespace column can be filtered and sorted.  Click on a method name and in the pane below it shows you the source code.

Talking about the memory profiler:

1. On the summary page it shows the top 10 largest objects and the top 10 classes with the most live instances at the time the snapshot was taken.

2. Under the all classes tab, you see the namespace, classname, module name, live count, live size in bytes, total number created and the total size.  All columns, again, are sortable.

For me, ANTS is the easiest tool out there to use for profiling code.  Its much easier to use and contains much more information than what CLRProfiler provides (granted, CLRProfiler is free).  Its also uses about half the memory, when running, than CLRProfiler.