What features should a C#/.NET profiler have?

Question

This could be a borderline advertisement, not to mention subjective, but the question is an honest one. For the last two months, I\'ve been developing a new open source profiler

Answer 1

My wish list:

• Really easy to use - simple (yet powerful) GUI
• Spectacular performance - ability to profile apps that are under extremely heavy usage.
• X64 and X32 support
• Understands SQL, is able to give me stack traces and duration for all my SQL calls, coupled with SQL.
• Easy to profile, no need to go through a complex, recompile the app process.
• Easy to profile services, web sites and processes which are launched as side effects
• A "production mode" which allows you to gather key stats from a production based system.
  • "Automatic bottleneck finder" : run against a production app and using heuristics determine which methods are slow.
• Per thread analysis, tell me which threads are doing all the work and where.
• Profile at various granularities, allow to perform a "cheap" profile that only gathers key info and dig in with granular profiling.
• Exception tracker, allow me to track all the exceptions which are thrown in my app (key stats and detailed info)
• Per thread profiling - allow me to profile a single thread in an app

Answer 2

Phsr already mentioned the EQATEC Profiler .

One feature it has that I like is that, even without reading any documentation or paying any attention at all to what I am doing, I was able to successfully, from start to finish, profile an application. Usability is a wonderful thing. Please be careful about how you add all those fancy options...don't kill usability in the process.