Walkthrough: Command-Line Profiling Using Sampling
This walkthrough demonstrates how to profile an application by using command-line tools and sampling to identify performance problems.
In this walkthrough, you will step through the process of profiling a managed application by using command-line tools, and use sampling to isolate and identify performance problems in the application.
In this walkthrough, you will follow these steps:
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Profile an application by using command line tools and sampling.
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Analyze sampled profiling results to locate and fix performance issues.
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Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System
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Intermediate understanding of C#
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Intermediate understanding of working with command line tools
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A copy of the PeopleTrax Sample
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To work with the information provided by profiling, it is best to have debugging symbol information available.
Sampling is a profiling method by which a specific process is periodically polled to determine the active function. The resulting data provides a count of how frequently the function was on top of the call stack when the process was sampled.
To profile an existing application by using the sampling method
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Open a command window and locate the directory that contains the sampling command-line tools.
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For profiling a managed application, type the following command to set the appropriate environment variables:VsPefCLREnv /sampleon
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Start profiling by running VSPerfCmd.exe, which is the command-line tool that controls the profiler. The following command starts the profiling session in the sampling mode:VsPerfCmd /start sample /output \\<dir>\PeopleTraxReport.vsp /launch \\<dir>\PeopleTrax.exe
The profiler process starts and attaches to the PeopleTrax.exe process. The profiler process starts to write the collected profiling data to the report file.
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Click Get People.
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Click Export Data.
Notepad opens and displays a new file that contains the exported data from PeopleTrax.
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Close Notepad, and then close the PeopleTrax application.
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For profiling managed applications, use the following command to reset the environmental variables:VSPerfCLREnv /off
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Analyze the results by using one of the following methods:
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Examine the raw .vsp file in the Visual Studio IDE.
— or —
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Generate a more detailed report by using the command-line tool VSPerfReport.exe. To generate reports for use outside the Visual Studio IDE use the following command:VSPerfReport <dir> PeopleTraxReport.vsp /output <dir> /summary:all
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For additional walkthroughs related to reporting profiling data from the command line, see:
How to: Gather Sampling Data using Command-line Tools
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=73531
How to: Gather Instrumentation Data using Command-line Tools
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=73611
How to: View ETW Data
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=73617
Performance Report Column Definition
