February 16th, 2012

Features, enhancements, and bug fixes

This release of ANTS Performance Profiler adds full support for profiling SharePoint 2010 sites, web applications running in IIS Express, and web applications deployed to Windows Azure or Amazon EC2.

The new integrated decompilation tool, using .NET Reflector technology, lets you decompile methods without source directly from the ANTS interface. You can navigate decompiled source from third-party and framework assemblies as if it was your own code. If you have the PDB file, you can even view line-level timings for the decompiled code, letting you identify the exact code that caused the bottleneck.

The release also includes an early access version of the ANTS Performance Profiler continuous profiling tool, a new profiler mode under development at Redgate. It's designed to log performance data on live, running ASP.NET applications. The tool logs method calls as they happen on your site, and stores results to display in a web interface: browse back through the timeline to see historical performance data, and analyze problems as they really occurred.

• Watch your code execute while your site is used, with hit counts, timings, and CPU figures.
• View real data captured while performance issues occurred: no need to stop your site, relaunch with a profiler, and guess at reproduction steps.
• Access results directly in your web browser.

This early access build of continuous profiling features an automatic installer, a timeline showing CPU usage, and a call tree that lets you see the method calls executing during a selected period of your application's execution. For full details, see Setting up continuous profiling.

Supported .NET Framework Versions

• 1.1
• 2.0
• 3.0
• 3.5
• 4.0
• Silverlight 4
• Silverlight 5

The .NET 3.5 runtime must be installed in order for ANTS Performance Profiler to run.

Supported OS Versions

• Windows XP SP2 or later
• Windows Server 2003
• Windows Vista
• Windows Server 2008
• Windows 7
• Windows Server 2008 R2

Supports 32-bit and 64-bit versions of all listed OSs. Windows 2000 is no longer supported.

Applications running on Windows Azure and Amazon EC2 platforms can also be profiled.

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

• Attach to process

The following features require Windows Vista or later:

• File I/O counters
• SQL counters

Supported Visual Studio Versions

The following versions of Microsoft Visual Studio are supported by the ANTS Performance Profiler 7 add-in:

• Visual Studio 2005
• Visual Studio 2008
• Visual Studio 2010

System Requirements

• 512MB RAM (minimum)
• 1GB free hard disk space for profiler results

Known Issues

• While the continuous profiler IIS module is installed, other profilers – including the desktop – will be unable to profile applications running in IIS on this computer. To re-enable other profilers with IIS, uninstall the IIS profiler module. See Setting up continuous profiling.
• Line-level timings are not available for Silverlight applications.
• Sandboxed web parts created in SharePoint 2010 cannot be profiled as child processes of the parent SharePoint collection. Instead the dedicated SPUserCodeV4 process can be profiled as a Windows service. For details, see Profiling SharePoint
• SharePoint subsites do not appear in the dropdown SharePoint site selection menu in Application Settings. Subsites can still be profiled by entering the URL directly into the ASP.NET web application (URL) field: for details, see Profiling SharePoint subsites.
• "My" sites in SharePoint can be profiled only on the original port, not on an unused port. For details on "My" sites, see Introduction to "My" site (MSDN).
• Some cheaper motherboards have an issue that causes their high performance timer to jump backwards or forwards in time by significant periods. This can cause anomalous results to appear in ANTS Performance Profiler 7, since the product relies on that timer to accurately measure application performance. If you experience this issue you should upgrade your motherboard drivers to the latest version.
• A limitation in Windows means that it is not possible to successfully attach to a .NET 4 process more than once.
• If you have Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista or later, it is not possible to profile websites on IIS.
• On Windows Vista and Windows 7, after profiling IIS using attach to process, ANTS Performance Profiler 6 sometimes cannot stop the session.  If this happens, restart ANTS Performance Profiler before starting a new profiling session. 
• In some cases, Windows Services do not restart properly after profiling.
• To profile an XBAP application, Internet Explorer must be set as your default browser and it must be closed before profiling.
• Custom event markers are not available when profiling Silverlight applications.