Walkthrough: Command-Line Profiling Using Sampling

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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:

  • Profile an application by using command line tools and sampling.

  • Analyze sampled profiling results to locate and fix performance issues.

Prerequisites

  • Visual Studio Premium or Visual Studio Ultimate

  • Intermediate understanding of Visual C#

  • Intermediate understanding of working with command line tools

  • A copy of the PeopleTrax Sample (Profiling Tools)

  • To work with the information provided by profiling, it is best to have debugging symbol information available.

Command Line Profiling Using the Sampling Method

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.

Note

Command-line tools of the Profiling Tools are located in the \Team Tools\Performance Tools subdirectory of the Visual Studio installation directory. On 64 bit computers, both 64 bit and 32 bit versions of the tools are available. To use the profiler command-line tools, you must add the path to the PATH environment variable of the command prompt window or add it to the command itself. For more information, see Specifying the Path to Profiling Tools Command Line Tools. PeopleTrax is a 32-bit application. 

To profile the PeopleTrax application by using the sampling method

  1. Install the PeopleTrax sample application and build the release version of the application.

  2. Open a command prompt window and add the Profiling Tools directory to the local Path environment variable.

  3. Change the working directory to the directory that contain the PeopleTrax binaries.

  4. Type the following command to set the appropriate environment variables:

    VSPerfCLREnv /sampleon

  5. Start profiling by running VSPerfCmd.exe, which is the command-line tool that controls the profiler. The following command starts the application and profiler in the sampling mode:

    VsPerfCmd /start:sample /output:PeopleTraxReport.vsp /launch: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.

  6. Click Get People.

  7. Click ExportData.

    Notepad opens and displays a new file that contains the exported data from PeopleTrax.

  8. Close Notepad, and then close the PeopleTrax application.

  9. Shut down the profiler. Type the following command:

    VSPerfCmd /shutdown

  10. Use the following command to reset the environmental variables:

    VSPerfCLREnv /sampleoff

  11. Profiling data is stored in the.vsp file Analyze the results by using one of the following methods:

    • Open the.vsp file in the Visual Studio IDE.

      — or —

    • Generate a comma-separated value (.csv) file 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

See Also

Reference

VSPerfCmd

Concepts

Profiling Tools Performance Session Overview

Using the Profiling Tools From the Command-Line

Understanding Sampling Data Values in Profiling Tools

Other Resources

Profiling Tools Report Views