ANTS Profiler by Red Gate gives a Command Performance

Introduction

When you start a software project, you don't always have optimization in mind. It may not be until the very end of the project that you realize your application is running too slow, or the application does not fit your customer's expectations with speed and responsiveness. It is at this point that you want to find a good profiling tool. Personally, I like a profiling tool in which I don't have to think too much. I want a profiler that will just install and after running my application, give me the results in a simple table format. The ANTS Performance Profiler is just such a tool.

Installation

Installation of the ANTS Profiler was relatively painless. Because the Profile supports profiling all the way back to Visual Studio 2005, the tool installs for all of these platforms. Personally, I'm good from 2008 to 2010, but I'm sure there are a few legacy apps out there which are still built on the older platform. ANTS installs directly into the menu structure of Visual Studio as shown in Figure 2. You also get the added bonus of .NET Reflector, which is an invaluable tool to the .NET developer. .NET Reflector (for those who have never used it before) can reflect through any .NET assembly to give you the underlying C# code. You can even use .NET Reflector to view Microsoft System .NET assemblies and see what they are doing under the covers.



Figure 2 - ANTS integration into Visual Studio

Using the Tool

I decided a fun thing to profile would be one of my articles on genetic algorithms, since these algorithms are so calculation intensive. I'm always interested on how I might improve them and make them faster since they seem to run for a long time.

Figure 3 shows an article I wrote on using the compact genetic algorithm to calculate roots. In the application, you enter a number and the root you want to compute (e.g. square root), and the compact genetic algorithm will run through a few thousand generations to figure out the closest root.



Figure 3 - Compact GA Algorithm for computing roots

Profiling the Application with ANTS

Profiling the application with ANTS Profiler is a snap. Simply open your solution in visual studio, and choose Profile Performance from the ANTS menu integrated in Studio. This will bring up the Peformance Analysis Window shown in figure 4 as well as launch your application.



Figure 4 - Performance Analysis Window in the ANTS Profiler

After the results come back from the GA algorithm, you can simply hit Stop Profiling and you are done collecting information. That's it. No fuss, no muss, and hardly any thinking. You don't need any knowledge of generated files and their extensions or command line arguments, you just get the results shown in figure 6.



Figure 5 - Results of profiling the Compact GA for Discovering Roots

Inside this window you can drill down into your heavily intensive cpu regions and see exactly in the code where we are spending our time. If we drill down into where the code is spending most of the percentage of its time (Figure 7), we see that it uses up half of its time generating chromosomes. This is to be expected, since each generation is generating 1000 chromosomes. That's a lot of random number generation!



Figure 6 - Drilling Down into the time intensive line of code

We might start to think of ways to reduce this time by generating the gene arrays using more optimal means

Let's use a regular Linq expression to see if we get any improvement

Listing 1 - Using Linq to generate the Gene Array in the Compact GA

_geneArray =    vector.Select(x => (x > (float)_geneGenerator.NextDouble()) ? 1 : 0).ToArray();

Figure 7 - Comparing Performance from a previous performance profile

This doesn't really give us a great improvement, but we are on the right track.

We can also use some of the parallelism in .NET 4 to improve are code since the GA application code is full of loops. We notice that our code is also spending a lot of time in the UpdateProbabilityVector which has a big for loop. Let's add the following code in order to force our for loop to run in parallel.

Listing 2 - Adding a Parallel For Loop to calculate the Probability Vectory in the Compact GA

       public void UpdateProbabilityVector(BinaryChromosome winner, BinaryChromosome loser)
              {
            Parallel.For(0, BinaryChromosome.kChromosomeLength, i =>
            {
                if (winner[i] != loser[i])
                {
                    if (winner[i] == 1)
                    {
                        _probabilityVector[i] = _probabilityVector[i] + (1.0f / (float)_populationSize);
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        _probabilityVector[i] = _probabilityVector[i] - (1.0f / (float)_populationSize);
                    }
                }
            });

              }

Changing the code to a parallel loop implementation gives us the following results from our ANTS Profiler:



Figure 8 - ANTS Optimization results after adding a Parallel For Loop in .NET 4.0

The percentage time spent in the UpdateProbabilityVector went down a good amount by taking advantage of multiple cores on the machine. One cool feature I noticed about the ANTS Profiler is that at any time you can click on a part of the time line and drag it to view the results in that region while you are still profiling. So I don't even have to wait for the stop profiling button to be pressed, I can just see where my CPU is being stressed by dragging that region down to view where in my code I have heavy usage.

Other Features of the Profiler

Although we didn't explore them here, it's worth mentioning a few other features the ANTS Performance Profiler gives you. You now have the ability to analyze I/O performance on any SQL Queries triggered from .NET code. This is a great way to help you examine your queries and stored procedures to speed up performance of complex database calls which you can test locally. Once you flush out the bottlenecks, you can deploy the necessary changes to the server. ANTS also has now has the ability to check the performance of Unit Tests as part of the build process. Unit tests are nothing more than code running outside your application, so there is certainly room for optimization in a unit test, especially if its slowing down your build and perhaps even your release cycle.

Conclusion

If you are approaching the end of a .NET project, or if you are placed on an existing .NET project with low performing code, you need a tool in your arsenal that will help you flush out the areas of the code that are making it behave sluggishly. The ANTS Performance Profiler by Red Gate Software is certainly worth considering because of its ease of use and detailed display of the codes performance. As of this review, the profiler retails at $395. If you need to explore memory leaks or memory handling problems, Red Gate also sells an ANTS Memory Profiler for profiling memory usage by your application. If you are interested in test driving the ANTS Performance Profiler or any of the Red Gate Products, you can download a trial version and use it for 14-days. The trial version contains both the Performance Profiler and the Memory Profiler.