Chapter 9. Profiling and Performance

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

  • Understanding the profiling features in Visual Studio 2010

  • Understanding available profiling types

  • Using Performance Explorer to configure profiling sessions

  • Profiling reports and available views

  • Profiling JavaScript

One of the more difficult tasks in software development is determining why an application performs slowly or inefficiently. Before Visual Studio 2010, developers were forced to turn to external tools to effectively analyze performance. Fortunately, Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition includes profiling tools that are fully integrated with both the IDE and other Visual Studio 2010 features.

This chapter introduces Visual Studio 2010's profiling tools. Note that the profiling features discussed in this chapter are available in Visual Studio 2010 Premium Edition or higher.

You'll learn how to use the profiler to identify problems such as inefficient code, over-allocation of memory, and bottlenecks. You will learn about the two main profiling options — sampling and instrumentation — including how to use each, and when each should be applied. In Visual Studio 2010, there are now two sampling options: one for CPU sampling, and the other for memory allocation sampling. This chapter examines both of these. This chapter also briefly reviews the new profiling method, introduced in Visual Studio 2010, to see thread contentions using concurrency profiling.

After learning how to run profiling analyzers, you will learn how to use ...

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