Visual Studio web profiling only shows iexplore

Question

When I run the Visual Studio 2012 profiler (Perfomance Analyzer) for a web app inside Visual Studio, it starts Internet Explorer and ends profiling when I close the IE window.

But after the analysis, results only show the iexplore.exe process and its internal calls, with no indication of how my assemblies are performing.

How can I configure the analyzer to profile my code? For desktop apps, it works without problems.

Laryngology

Answer 1

We have four types of Profiling available in VS 2012.

• CPU Sampling
• Instrumentation (Java script Profiling)
• Dot Net Memory Allocation (Dot Net assembly profiling)
• Concurrency

By default when you start performance analysis for web application it runs CPU sampling and the report you get will contain only process level information.Follow the below steps to run Dot Net Memory Allocation Profiling.

• Open the ASP.NET Web project in Visual Studio Premium or Visual Studio Ultimate.

• On the Analyze menu, click Launch Performance Wizard.

• On the first page of the wizard, select a Dot Net Memory Allocation Profling, and then click Next.

• In the Which application would you like to target for profiling? drop-down list, make sure that the current project is selected, and then click Next.
• On the fourth page of the wizard, click Finish.

Hope this helps!!!!

Lotuseater

I would want to profile server side CPU for my .NET web app, not managed memory allocation. I don't have leaks or other memory issues, I just wanted to detect bottlenecks in certain long running operations. But the issue is that VS profiler only profiles client-side execution (native iexplore code), which is useless to me. – Laryngology

You cannot profile assembly level information from CPU process. Best way would be running a memory profiling and optimize the code which consumes more memory which in turn will avoid the bottleneck in your assembly. – Lotuseater

Memory usage has little to do with CPU usage. I can easily profile a .NET console, winforms or WPF application from Visual Studio using both CPU sampling and instrumentation (first two types of profiling you mentioned). My problem is that VS2015, when profiling a web application, for some reason only profiles native iexplore.exe code. – Laryngology