What Are Some Good .NET Profilers?

Answer 1

If Licensing is an issue you could try WINDBG for memory profiling

Answer 2

I've been testing Telerik's JustTrace recently and although it is well away from a finished product the guys are going in the right direction.

Answer 3

We selected YourKit Profiler for .NET in my company as it was the best value (price vs. feature). For a small company that wants to have flexible licensing (floating licenses) it was a perfect choice - ANTS was developer seat locket at the time.

Also, it provided us with the ability to attach to the running process which was not possible with dotTrace. Beware though that attaching is not the best option as everything .NET will slow down, but this was the only way to profile .NET applications started by other processes. Feature wise, ANTS and dotTrace were better - but in the end YourKit was good enough.

Answer 4

Unfortunate most of the profilers I tried failed when used with tail calls, most notably ANTS. I just end up writing my own. There is a simple implementation on CodeProject that you can use as a base.

Answer 5

The NuMega True Time profiler lives on in DevPartner Studio by Micro Focus. It provides line and method level detail for .NET apps requiring only PDBs, no source needed (but it helps.) It can discriminate between algorithmically heavy routines versus those with long I/O waits using our proprietary per thread kernel mode timing driver. Version 10.5 ships with new 64-process support on February 4, 2011. Shameless plug: I work on the DevPartner product line. Follow up at http://www.DevPartner.com for news of the 10.5 launch.

Disclaimer: I am the Product Manager for DevPartner at Micro Focus.

Answer 6

I have found dotTrace Profiler by JetBrains to be an excellent profiling tool for .NET and their ASP.NET mode is quality.