January 18th, 2011

New features

• Redesigned summary. This gives immediate feedback on where your memory is being used, and now warns you if problems with large object heap fragmentation are detected.
• New Instance Categorizer graph. Groups the instances of the class that you are investigating by the shortest path to the GC root, allowing you quickly to spot any paths that should not hold references to the instances.
• Redesigned and reorganized filters.
• New 'show only survivors in growing classes' filter highlights any classes where no instances were disposed between two snapshots, even though the number of instances of that class increased.
• Field properties now available on the Instance Retention Graph.
• Improved support for WPF: Dependency properties now shown with other field properties.
• Snapshot API lets you take snapshots from your code.

See Upgrading from ANTS Memory Profiler version 6 to version 7.

Known issues

Limitations of the .NET 1.1 framework restrict the memory information ANTS Memory Profiler can retrieve. Specifically, with .NET 1.1 applications:

• Object disposal cannot be tracked.
• LOH fragmentation detection is less reliable.
• The generation in which an object is held cannot be identified.
• Field values and static variable values cannot be displayed.
• Profiling runs more slowly.

The following feature requires the .NET 4.0 runtime and Windows Vista or later:

• Attach to process

Additionally:

• For some types of application, you may have to run ANTS Memory Profiler as an administrator.
• If you have Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista x64 or Windows Server 2008 x64, it is not possible to profile ASP.NET websites on IIS. Upgrading to Internet Explorer 8 will solve this problem.
• On Windows Vista and Windows 7, after profiling IIS using attach to process, ANTS Memory Profiler 7 sometimes cannot stop the session. If this happens, restart ANTS Memory Profiler before starting a new profiling session.
• In some cases, Windows Services do not restart properly after profiling. Use services.msc to restart services if required.
• To profile an XBAP application, Internet Explorer must be set as your default browser and it must be closed before profiling.
• To profile a .NET 4 process, you must first disable concurrent garbage collection.
• A limitation in Windows means that it is not possible to successfully attach to a .NET 4 process more than once.
• SharePoint 2010 is not supported.
• The snapshot API does not work with Silverlight applications, due to security restrictions in Silverlight.