Summarizing process never ends in ANTS Performance Profiler

Somnath

Its just 1month I purchased RedGate .NET Developer Bundle.

I was using ANTS Performance Profiler 6 to profile one of my Silverlight applications. Suddenly ANTS Performance Profiler 6 throws exception and tried to send the bug report but it was failed to send the error report to remote server due to network security.

Now I’m facing one issue. Whenever I start to profile my Silverlight 4 application it unable to profile and unable to summarizing the results... and summarizing process never ends...

I'm using Windows 7, Visual Studio 2010. I have tried downloading and installing new binaries. But no luck...

Please help...

Regards,
Somnath

Brian Donahue

Thanks for posting in the Performance Profiler forum. I think there are two issues at work. One is that IE doesn't give us a predictable process ID for the instance of iexplore.exe running the Silverlight. The only way to make it work reliably is to kill all instances of IE from Task Manager (some may not even be "visible").

The second problem is a bug that when there are no results or an error occurs sending results, the green thing spins around forever ( PP-1144 ). We're working to get this fixed.

Somnath

Hi Brian,

I tried to profile a wpf application also. After sometime if I press "Stop Profilling" button. Same thing happens.. "Summarizing results.." never ends..

Regards,
Somnath Panja

Brian Donahue

Right. Profiler is making your application crash, which may or may not be its' fault, and it has an embarrassing bug.

stevehurcombe

Hi Brian,
I'm getting the same symptoms as this with a WCF 4 application in IIS.

I can attach to the process OK and run a profile, but it's not a line level analysis.

Do you have an update?

Many thanks
Steve

Brian Donahue wrote:

Thanks for posting in the Performance Profiler forum. I think there are two issues at work. One is that IE doesn't give us a predictable process ID for the instance of iexplore.exe running the Silverlight. The only way to make it work reliably is to kill all instances of IE from Task Manager (some may not even be "visible").

The second problem is a bug that when there are no results or an error occurs sending results, the green thing spins around forever ( PP-1144 ). We're working to get this fixed.

Brian Donahue

Looks like we're in another one of those "unless you can reproduce it we won't try to fix it" arguments.

At one point, I could get this to happen sometimes by killing the process being profiled in Task Manager. But I can't get it to happen reliably enough. Any pointers as to how I can hang Profiler on summarizing results are most welcome.

stevehurcombe

Hi Brian,
Completely understand, obviously I can reproduce it here - happy to have a remote desktop session if that helps. It happens 100%.

Cheers
Steve

Brian Donahue wrote:

Looks like we're in another one of those "unless you can reproduce it we won't try to fix it" arguments.

At one point, I could get this to happen sometimes by killing the process being profiled in Task Manager. But I can't get it to happen reliably enough. Any pointers as to how I can hang Profiler on summarizing results are most welcome.

Brian Donahue

Yes, but need to reproduce in-house. This softeware is totally unfriendly to production debugging. Obviously ANTS Profiler is causing your program to crash, that's problem number one. Then there is a deadlock bug on summaraizing - that's problem number two.

So I need to have this happen on my computer. What special thing is ProfilerCore.dll doing that hoses your application in the first place? Is there anything in the event log?

stevehurcombe

These are the steps:

1. Start a profile session.
2. The browser loads but displays a 404 message.
3. ANTS spins 'Summarizing results'.
4. If I refresh the browser page then the API call works and a new W3P process is NOT created.

There are no messages in the event log other than 'Message logging has been turned on'.

The W3P process that reported the message is still active and hasn't crashed. If my code had really died I would have expected that process to die as well??

If I attach to the process directly then all is well. I can also profile an ASP.Net 3.5 (2.0) application just fine on the same machine.

The only unusual factor that I can think of is that this is a WCF 4.0 application. There's nothing complicated about the application itself.

I wonder if the profile is starting too quickly? After IIS is listening but before WCF has started.

Is there any additional logging I can enable?

Best regards
Steve

Brian Donahue wrote:

Yes, but need to reproduce in-house. This softeware is totally unfriendly to production debugging. Obviously ANTS Profiler is causinf you rprogram to crash, that's problem number one. Then it was a deadlock bug on summaraizing - that's problem number two.

So I need to have this happen on my computer. What special thing is ProfilerCore.dll doing that hoses your application in the first place? Is there anything in the event log?

stevehurcombe

It seems that the VS 2010 profiler won't work either.

This page suggests that there is a location element missing (I'm getting an identical error):

http://netindonesia.net/blogs/jimmy/arc ... t-not.aspx

Could that be tripping up ANTS too?

S.

Brian Donahue wrote:

Yes, but need to reproduce in-house. This softeware is totally unfriendly to production debugging. Obviously ANTS Profiler is causing your program to crash, that's problem number one. Then there is a deadlock bug on summaraizing - that's problem number two.

So I need to have this happen on my computer. What special thing is ProfilerCore.dll doing that hoses your application in the first place? Is there anything in the event log?

stevehurcombe

Hi Brian,
Scratch that. VS 2010 started working I just ran it again...doh!

S.

Brian Donahue wrote:

Yes, but need to reproduce in-house. This softeware is totally unfriendly to production debugging. Obviously ANTS Profiler is causing your program to crash, that's problem number one. Then there is a deadlock bug on summaraizing - that's problem number two.

So I need to have this happen on my computer. What special thing is ProfilerCore.dll doing that hoses your application in the first place? Is there anything in the event log?

Andrew H

There's a bug somewhere in the UI logic that leaves the 'summarizing' screen up when the target process has stopped before .NET has started. It's supposed to display a message to the effect that there are no results available instead (which is still kind of unhelpful, but unfortunately it's all that the profiler can really see happening).

With an ASP.NET application, ANTS monitors an instance of Internet Explorer, and stops profiling once it goes away. Sometimes IE farms off the request from ANTS to another instance of itself and quits immediately, which looks to ANTS the same as if you had closed the window. I think from your description that this is most likely what's happening (if this is what's happening, then the 'summarizing results' spinny will show up around the same time the browser opens).

If the 'stop profiling' button is grayed out when the browser is open, then this is almost certainly what's happened: it's only lit while the profiler thinks that the target process is running.

One thing to look for is whether or not protected mode is on when the browser opens. ANTS *should* be creating a browser that is running with protected mode turned off. If protected mode is on, then one thing that might fix the issue is manually turning it off in IE's settings.

Which version of IE are you running? IE7 has protected mode but doesn't have a way to start with it turned off (the feature was added in IE8), and might be a source of these issues.

Something else that might be worth trying is profiling the C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe process using the desktop application profiling mode. The profiler shouldn't display the spinner until after IE exits: if it shows up right away then there's something odd going on (the spinner won't disappear due to the UI bug, at least, unless you load a page with Silverlight on it).

Brian Donahue

I suspect this is happening on apps other than Silverlight though. I've tried some things to reproduce this today such as throwing an Access Violation in the Application_Start of the web application without a result, so I did suspect that what I need to do is get w3wp to fail when trying to load mscorlib. I can't quite figure out how to make that happen.

stevehurcombe

Hi,
That fixed it. I am running IE9 and it had launched in protected mode. Disabling that fixed the problem.

Thanks!

S.

AndrewH wrote:

There's a bug somewhere in the UI logic that leaves the 'summarizing' screen up when the target process has stopped before .NET has started. It's supposed to display a message to the effect that there are no results available instead (which is still kind of unhelpful, but unfortunately it's all that the profiler can really see happening).

With an ASP.NET application, ANTS monitors an instance of Internet Explorer, and stops profiling once it goes away. Sometimes IE farms off the request from ANTS to another instance of itself and quits immediately, which looks to ANTS the same as if you had closed the window. I think from your description that this is most likely what's happening (if this is what's happening, then the 'summarizing results' spinny will show up around the same time the browser opens).

If the 'stop profiling' button is grayed out when the browser is open, then this is almost certainly what's happened: it's only lit while the profiler thinks that the target process is running.

One thing to look for is whether or not protected mode is on when the browser opens. ANTS *should* be creating a browser that is running with protected mode turned off. If protected mode is on, then one thing that might fix the issue is manually turning it off in IE's settings.

Which version of IE are you running? IE7 has protected mode but doesn't have a way to start with it turned off (the feature was added in IE8), and might be a source of these issues.

Something else that might be worth trying is profiling the C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe process using the desktop application profiling mode. The profiler shouldn't display the spinner until after IE exits: if it shows up right away then there's something odd going on (the spinner won't disappear due to the UI bug, at least, unless you load a page with Silverlight on it).

stevehurcombe

Hi,
One small point the browser starts and I get a 404 error. Hitting refresh though starts things up nicely.

S.

AndrewH wrote:

There's a bug somewhere in the UI logic that leaves the 'summarizing' screen up when the target process has stopped before .NET has started. It's supposed to display a message to the effect that there are no results available instead (which is still kind of unhelpful, but unfortunately it's all that the profiler can really see happening).

With an ASP.NET application, ANTS monitors an instance of Internet Explorer, and stops profiling once it goes away. Sometimes IE farms off the request from ANTS to another instance of itself and quits immediately, which looks to ANTS the same as if you had closed the window. I think from your description that this is most likely what's happening (if this is what's happening, then the 'summarizing results' spinny will show up around the same time the browser opens).

If the 'stop profiling' button is grayed out when the browser is open, then this is almost certainly what's happened: it's only lit while the profiler thinks that the target process is running.

One thing to look for is whether or not protected mode is on when the browser opens. ANTS *should* be creating a browser that is running with protected mode turned off. If protected mode is on, then one thing that might fix the issue is manually turning it off in IE's settings.

Which version of IE are you running? IE7 has protected mode but doesn't have a way to start with it turned off (the feature was added in IE8), and might be a source of these issues.

Something else that might be worth trying is profiling the C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe process using the desktop application profiling mode. The profiler shouldn't display the spinner until after IE exits: if it shows up right away then there's something odd going on (the spinner won't disappear due to the UI bug, at least, unless you load a page with Silverlight on it).

Somnath

Hi,

I was busy so I couldn’t reply. Now I’m back to work and facing the same issue while profiling WPF Application.

Whether this issue is fixed or not? I'm in completely in trap now. I don't know how to solve it. I have purchased ANTS but I'm unable to use it. .

Regards,
Somnath

Andrew H

All of the issues that we know of that could result in this behaviour should have been fixed by the 6.3 update.

However, this might not solve your issue: as detailed above, the 'summarising' screen would most commonly show up when the target application exited before providing any profiling data. This most commonly happens with profiling sessions that target Internet Explorer in some way (Silverlight, XBAP or ASP.NET sessions), generally due to the security settings in IE causing the profiler to be kicked out of the session.

Newer versions of the profiler will display the proper 'no results' message in these cases. Generally, switching off protected mode in IE is all that's needed to work around the problems (quitting any other open instances can sometimes be required as well).

I'm not aware of any issues that specifically hit WPF applications that could result in this. One trick you can try with desktop applications is to profile cmd.exe and then launch the applications you want to profile from there: ANTS won't end the session until the command window is closed.

Somnath

Hi,

Would you like to join my desktop sharing session so that you can look into the issue remotely? I can reproduce the issue here. I can help you in reproducing the issue and fixing it.

Please let me know if you need any farther information from my side.

Regards,
Somnath