Profiling Any .NET Process

To select a profiling configuration

• In the toolbar, in the list of profiling configurations, select:

  • either one of the predefined configurations: Sampling or Timeline,

  • or your own custom configuration.

To create a profiling configuration

1. In the toolbar, in the list of profiling configurations, select Edit Configurations….

2. In the opened Profiling Configurations window, click to add a new profiling configuration.

3. Specify configuration Name and other profiling options:

   • Profiling type

     Profiling Method	Profiling Type	Description	Use Case
     Performance Profiling Detailed timing information about function calls.	Sampling	Accurate time measurement, number of calls is not measured.	Recommended for most cases. Ideal when you look for performance issues in your app for the first time.
     	Tracing*	Accurate calls number measurement, time measurement may be inaccurate due to profiling overhead.	When sampling data is not enough. For example, for analyzing algorithm complexity (when info about number of calls is more valuable than call time values).
     	Line-by-line*	Each line of code is measured, call time values are inaccurate due to huge profiler overhead.	For advanced use cases only. For example, when you already know what function causes issues and want to analyze each line of it.
     Timeline Profiling Detailed temporal data about application threads and events.	Timeline	Collects temporal data about thread states, application events, and other multi-threading data. Based on Event Tracing for Windows (ETW).	Recommended for most cases. Especially, for analyzing multithreaded apps. Use it, for example, to determine the cause of UI freezes, excessive garbage collections, uneven workload distribution, insufficient I/O, and so on.

   • Profile child processes: If selected, dotTrace will profile not only the main app process but the processes it runs as well.

   • Record profiling data from start: If selected, dotTrace will start collecting profiling data right after the launch. Otherwise, dotTrace will start collecting the data only after you click Start Recording in the Performance Profiler tool window.

To start a session and get snapshots

1. In the main menu, select Run | Attach to Process with Profiling or click the corresponding button on the toolbar. This will open a list of running processes.

2. Select the process you want to profile (note that this must be a managed .NET process).

   Once the profiling is started, you will see the Performance Profiler tool window opened on the Profiling tab with the profiling controller inside.

3. If you disabled Record profiling data from start in the profiling configuration, click Start Recording to start recording profiling data.
   Basically, now all you need is reproduce the performance issue you are looking for or, if you just evaluate the overall app performance, go through the desired usage scenarios in your application.

4. Click Get Snapshot. The collected snapshot will be added to the list of snapshots inside the Performance Profiler window. To start collecting profiling data again, click Start Recording one more time.

To analyze a snapshot

1. On the All Snapshots tab of the Performance Profiler tool window, select the snapshot you want to analyze.

2. Analyze the collected data using one of the views:

   • Call Tree: a "classic" call tree that shows you all method calls in all threads. Each top-level node represents a top-level function which was executed by a certain thread. Use this view to quickly get down to actual application activity. Learn more

   • Top Methods: the best place to start when analyzing application performance. It is a simple plain list of methods with the highest execution time. Note that you can reduce the system functions "noise" by excluding them from the list using the toggle: if enabled, method's execution time is calculated as a sum of method's own time and the time of all child system methods (down to the next user method in the stack). Learn more

3. Once the suspicious method is found, press F4 or select Jump to Source from the context menu. Rider will navigate you right to the method's source code.