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Stack OverflowAny good free .NET profiler?
[+160] [9] Ramesh Soni
[2008-11-21 13:46:15]
[ .net free profiler ]
[ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/308816/any-good-free-net-profiler ] [DELETED]

Is there any good free .NET [1] profiler available?

[+129] [2009-01-15 14:23:24] Sudarsh [ACCEPTED]

EQATEC Profiler [1]. To profile PFX-signed assemblies, please refer to the post Re-sign assembly issues [2] as EQATEC only supports SNK files.

You can use a utility [3] to convert your PFX files to proper SNK files.

Update

Since this answer was originally written, EQATEC is no longer available as a free product. Thus, this answer is not a suitable answer to the question anymore.

[1] http://www.eqatec.com/tools/profiler
[2] http://support.eqatec.com/entries/20324712-re-sign-assembly-issues?page=1#post_21792982
[3] http://support.eqatec.com/attachments/token/zuo93nesxyscwls/?name=PfxToSnk.zip

(5) I was looking for a good .Net Profiler so long... crying tears of joy - Big, fat thank you - Xn0vv3r
Same, thanks for the pointer! - kurious
I like this one pretty well. I wonder how it would take off if it was open-sourced. - EnocNRoll
Thanks for this one! Unfortunately, I had to print to XPS format in order to compare two reports. - EnocNRoll
Its works fine. +1 for this :) - Kapilg
Whew...I thought I was gonna have to shell out a pile of cash for ANTS ;) I love Red-Gate but c'mon...that's too much to spend on profiling. - JC Grubbs
Exactly what I was looking for. +1 - Harry Steinhilber
(22) Just wanted to confirm, EQATEC is not exactly free, it is only free for personal use, not for commercial purposes, which would mean that i cant use it for professional work - Dinesh Manne
@EnocNRoll: In version 3 you'll find the much-desired "compare report" functionality - Richard Flamsholt
(10) EQATEC Profiler version 2.0 is free (BSD License). - Brian
And whats best: It supports .NET CF (Wince) - ollifant
Free version doesn't show all method names (some of them are shortened) - MartyIX
@MartyIX Only Silverlight method-names will not be revealed without a license. When profiling other application types (full .net and compact framework) all the method-names will surely always be shown, regardless of your license - i.e. in the free version too. - Richard Flamsholt
Richard Flamsholt: It's strange because I don't use Silverlight: img709.imageshack.us/img709/1417/tstg.jpg - this is what I ment by "shortened method names". It's a plain winform application combined with XNA (but it is not in the selected method in the picture). - MartyIX
(2) It cannot debug ASP.Net applications - horseman
(13) @Dinesh Manne: From the pricing page: Free license You have the right to install EQATEC Profiler on any number of computers and you alone may use the software for your personal and/or commercial use. - Lazlo
(1) @MartyIX this is a year and a half late, but I don't see what you mean by "shortened method name" in your screenshot. Those look like full method names to me. - Davy8
Davy8: See the "details" window but I don't remember it all that good now. - MartyIX
(1) @Davy8: The "shortened method-names" was an old license-restriction. That was too confusing so nowadays the full names are shown, and the license is instead focused on the max number of DLLs that can be profiled at once. - Richard Flamsholt
sweet - free for personal use +1 - Fraser
(3) Free, for 3 assemblies... - Steve
(2) EQATEC profiler is no longer free. They've been bought out by Telerik in a bid to stomp out competition. - Asad
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[+22] [2009-10-15 14:36:45] Trillian

SlimTune [1] is a lesser known but very good .NET profiler. It does not support memory profiling, but on the performance profiling side, its author claims it has reached feature parity with NProf. My experience with it is very positive: it "just works".

[1] http://code.google.com/p/slimtune/

Just tried SlimTune for the first time. One advantage over NProf is that you can start seeing data before your program run has terminated. For reference, it's a sampling only profiler (like NProf) for now, but it looks like the author has plans to add other options. - Chris
(1) +1: Very useful. For some uses, I much prefer it over Eqatec. - Brian
(4) I can't tell what the results mean. For instance, Function detail what does the pie graph tell us about execution? What I might like to see is how much of total execution time was spent in function A, for instance. - Limited Atonement
(1) Yeah, I cannot get SlimTune to produce any meaningful results. - Jon Harrop
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[+9] [2010-07-16 10:57:27] Mau

Visual Studio 2010 Premium and Ultimate contain a decent profiler. So if you're lucky enough to be using one of those, that's free.


You're right. See edit. - Mau
(1) It's bug ridden. Crashes with object references exceptions and mangles my web.config file for some reason. Definitely not impressed with VS's profiler. - willem
(1) Oh my. Please go and check the prices of the Premium and Ultimate versions, and revise your "free" definition :D Sorry, I just had to write it.. I know what you meant: "If your company gave you VS Ultimate, you already have a profiler". But, gosh, very not free in overall! - quetzalcoatl
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[+7] [2010-01-02 02:45:22] Mike Dunlavey

I do a lot of work in .NET [1], and whenever there is a performance problem, like the application takes too long to load, or messing with third-party controls seems to take uncomfortably long, by the time somebody figures out how to fire up a profiler, this method tells what the problem is [2].

It gets a lot of disbelief, because it's not a separate tool, it's just a way of using the IDE, and the disbelief persists even after it nails the problems.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework
[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/375913/what-can-i-use-to-profile-c-code-in-linux/378024#378024

+1 for linking to that other question... great tip! - Dan
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[+3] [2008-11-21 13:48:16] Winston Smith

You can give the CLR profiler [1] a try.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms979205.aspx

(8) The CLRProfiler is a memory allocation profiler, not a code execution profiler (which is what most people want) - U62
On top of that, its buggy. Even I fixed some of its bugs. Not very reliable. - Nayan
(1) And on top of that it is not intuitive nor easy to use.. - Andrei Rinea
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[+3] [2009-03-06 15:06:08] Martin

NProf still works: http://nprof.sourceforge.net/Site/Description.html


It blew up almost immediately for me, whereas EQATEC profiler worked fine. - EnocNRoll
NProf works great, I downloaded version 0.11 from code.google.com/p/nprof - nornagon
Doesn't seem to be developed with any continuity. While not a completely dead project, there's not much life in it. - Batibix
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[+1] [2008-11-21 13:47:39] Patrick Desjardins

Prof-it [1]

Prof-It is an easy-to-use standalone profiler for C# that measures execution frequencies for each statement while keeping the instrumentation of the source code to a minimum. Prof-It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Now it is mantained in SourceForge.

eqatec [2] The EQATEC Profiler is a code profiler, not a memory profiler. So it's all about making your app run faster, not about tracking objects and memory.

[1] http://prof-it.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://www.eqatec.com/tools/profiler

(1) Hmm... looks like there is not much recent activity on this project since 3 years. Also, it requires .NET 1.x, the Solation is for VS2003 cannot be imported in VS 2008. Too bad, the screenshots look good :-( - Christian.K
(2) This was a waste of time. I am surprised that it was the accepted answer. - EnocNRoll
It didn't work. I'm quite happy with EQATEC now. - h0b0
There's even the source code on the new webpage: prof-it.sourceforge.net - alcor
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[+1] [2012-03-01 19:00:26] Louis Somers

Two good ones that are also free:

[1] http://smartbear.com/products/free-tools/aqtime-standard/
[2] http://www.icsharpcode.net/opensource/sd/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SharpDevelop

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[-1] [2011-07-27 17:45:18] charith rasanga

I think Telerik has an advanced profiling tool [1], but it's not free. You will have to buy it after 60 days, but until then it will work fine.. It is something worth giving a try...

[1] http://www.telerik.com/products/memory-performance-profiler.aspx

-1 the question asks for a "Free" code profiler. How is this an answer if you have to pay for it. Sorry. - Francis Rodgers
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