Using the MS Standalone Profiler in VS2008 Professional
I am trying to profile my .NET dll when running it from VS Unit Testing Tools but I am having problems. I am using a standalone command line profiler as VS2008 Professional does not come with a built-in profiler.
I have a CMD window open and you run the following commands (I measured this earlier, so vsinstr gave a warning what it did):
C:\...\BusinessRules\obj\Debug>vsperfclrenv /samplegclife /tracegclife /globalsamplegclife /globaltracegclife
Enabling VSPerf Sampling Attach Profiling. Allows to 'attaching' to managed applications.
Current Profiling Environment variables are:
COR_ENABLE_PROFILING=1
COR_PROFILER={0a56a683-003a-41a1-a0ac-0f94c4913c48}
COR_LINE_PROFILING=1
COR_GC_PROFILING=2
C:\...\BusinessRules\obj\Debug>vsinstr BusinessRules.dll
Microsoft (R) VSInstr Post-Link Instrumentation 9.0.30729 x86
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved.
Error VSP1018 : VSInstr does not support processing binaries that are already instrumented.
C:\...\BusinessRules\obj\Debug>vsperfcmd /start:trace /output:foo.vsp
Microsoft (R) VSPerf Command Version 9.0.30729 x86
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved.
C:\...\BusinessRules\obj\Debug>
Then I ran the unit tests that used the instrumented code. When the unit tests were complete, I did ...
C:\...\BusinessRules\obj\Debug>vsperfcmd /shutdown
Microsoft (R) VSPerf Command Version 9.0.30729 x86
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved.
Waiting for process 4836 ( C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\vstesthost.exe) to shutdown...
Obviously it was waiting for VS2008 to close, so I closed it ...
Shutting down the Profile Monitor
------------------------------------------------------------
C:\...\BusinessRules\obj\Debug>
Everything looked good, there was a 3.2mb foo.vsp file in the directory. Then I did ...
C:\...\BusinessRules\obj\Debug>vsperfreport foo.vsp /summary:all
Microsoft (R) VSPerf Report Generator, Version 9.0.0.0
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
VSP2340: Environment variables were not properly set during profiling run and managed symbols may not resolve. Please use vsperfclrenv before profiling.
File opened
Successfully opened the file.
A report file, foo_Header.csv, has been generated.
A report file, foo_MarksSummary.csv, has been generated.
A report file, foo_ProcessSummary.csv, has been generated.
A report file, foo_ThreadSummary.csv, has been generated.
Analysis completed
A report file, foo_FunctionSummary.csv, has been generated.
A report file, foo_CallerCalleeSummary.csv, has been generated.
A report file, foo_CallTreeSummary.csv, has been generated.
A report file, foo_ModuleSummary.csv, has been generated.
C:\...\BusinessRules\obj\Debug>
Pay attention to the warning about environment variables and vsperfclrenv usage? But I ran! Maybe I was using the wrong switches? I dont know. In any case, uploading CSV files to Excel or using the perfconsole tool gives a ton of useful information with useless symbol names:
*** Loading commands from: C:\temp\PerfConsole\bin\commands\timebytype.dll
*** Adding command: timebytype
*** Loading commands from: C:\temp\PerfConsole\bin\commands\partition.dll
*** Adding command: partition
Welcome to PerfConsole 1.0 (for bugs please email: joshwil@microsoft.com), for help type: ?, for a quickstart type: ??
> load foo.vsp
*** Couldn't match to either expected sampled or instrumented profile schema, defaulting to sampled
*** Couldn't match to either expected sampled or instrumented profile schema, defaulting to sampled
*** Profile loaded from 'foo.vsp' into @foo
>
> functions @foo
>>>>> Function Name
Exclusive Inclusive Function Name Module Name
-------------------- -------------------- -------------- ---------------
900,798,600,000.00 % 900,798,600,000.00 % 0x0600003F 20397910
14,968,500,000.00 % 44,691,540,000.00 % 0x06000040 14736385
8,101,253,000.00 % 14,836,330,000.00 % 0x06000041 5491345
3,216,315,000.00 % 6,876,929,000.00 % 0x06000042 3924533
<snip>
71,449,430.00 % 71,449,430.00 % 0x0A000074 42572
52,914,200.00 % 52,914,200.00 % 0x0A000073 0
14,791.00 % 13,006,010.00 % 0x0A00007B 0
199,177.00 % 6,082,932.00 % 0x2B000001 5350072
2,420,116.00 % 2,420,116.00 % 0x0A00008A 0
836.00 % 451,888.00 % 0x0A000045 0
9,616.00 % 399,436.00 % 0x0A000039 0
18,202.00 % 298,223.00 % 0x06000046 1479900
I'm so close that I can find bottlenecks if only it gives me function and module names instead of hexadecimal numbers!
What am I doing wrong?
--- Alistair.
a source to share
The reason is that I was not running the executable in the same process in which the environment variables were defined. Instrumental code needs access to environment variables, not a profiler.
So, I ran VS2008 directly from the command line after using vsperfclrenv and it all worked and I have my function names.
Unfortunately, I am still getting schematic errors that I cannot drill through the call tree, but at least I was able to identify this bottleneck.
--- Alistair.
a source to share
Several possible attempts (note that I am not an expert in command line profiler - I have only used this a couple of times):
-
docs for
vsperfclrenv
says:The option you choose depends on which of the three types of profiling you are using: sampling, instrumentation, or global.
You have options for all three types of profiling in your call
vsperfclrenv
- I suggest you pick one type to start with and go from there if that works, but you want to try other things and see if they work better. -
You may need to provide a location for the symbols (even if it is not done with
vsperfclrenv
). The location of the symbol can be customized using the environment variable_NT_SYMBOLS_PATH
or/SymbolPath
beforevsperfreport
(or by having .pdb files in the same location as the binaries). See How to Specify the Location of Symbol Files from the Command Line for details .
a source to share