Silverlight 4 Memory Profiling

cjlotz

Hi

With the new Performance Profiler EAP supporting Silverlight 4 applications, what is the future picture w.r.t memory profiling for Silverlight 4. Is that even at all possible with Silverlight 4, i.e. have the right hooks been added to the run time?

slaphead99

Hi, thanks for your question. I'll check with our product development team.

slaphead99

ANTS Profiler can profile any .NET application hosted in the .NET Common Language Runtime. Although Silverlight code can be written in the C# and VB .NET languages, it cannot be profiled because the client-end of the Silverlight application that runs in a user's browser does not implement the entire .NET CLR, but rather a lightweight version that is isolated from the actual runtime installation. This "lightweight" runtime does not implement the Microsoft code profiling interface, and therefore ANTS Profiler cannot instrument the Intermediate Language code running inside.

Microsoft does plan to implement a profiling process in Silverlight version 4, so we are currently evaluating the feasibility of adding support for Silverlight applications if and when this is implemented in Silverlight.

cjlotz

Thanks - I understand all of these limitations and we are currently running the latest ANTS 6 Performance Profiler EAP which already supports the performance profiling of SL 4 applications. However, in all of my research, I haven't found any mention on whether you will actually be able to do memory profiling as well. So my first question is still - can you do memory profiling in SL 4 (i.e. does it support the hooks to allow it) and if it does, do you have a roadmap w.r.t adding this to ANTS Memory profiler?

Thanks

jrg

You could look at the EAP release of ANTS memory profiler 6.

http://www.red-gate.com/MessageBoard/viewtopic.php?t=11349

Some of the highlights of this version:

Support for Silverlight
Attach to process