Windows Developer Power Tools

15.13 Finding Bottlenecks with NProf

Premature optimization is the root of much development evil. On the other hand, sometimes you need to find out why your application is performing poorly. How do you find out where the delays are? Littering your code with debug statements trying to track down bottlenecks is a really bad use of time.

NProf can help you identify bottlenecks with a simple user interface to monitor your application. Additionally, it provides a separate API if you want to manually instrument your code.

NProf at a Glance
Tool	NProf
Version covered	0.9 alpha (Note: the tool is quite stable despite its “alpha” designation)
Home page	http://www.mertner.com/confluence/display/NProf/Home/
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/11
Summary	Simple profiler for finding bottlenecks in .NET apps. Supports ASP.NET profiling.
License type	GPL, LGPL
Online resources	Documentation, mailing list, forums, bug tracker
Supported Frameworks	.NET 1.1, 2.0

Getting Started

NProf’s binary distribution is an executable installer file. Run that and start NProf from the NProf folder added to the Start menu. NProf’s UI will start up, ready for you to create a new profiling project (Figure 15-36).

Figure 15-36. NProf’s initial screen

Using NProf

To put NProf to work, you must first create a project to hold ...