Unable to profile ASP.Net application. IIS does not restart

nkumar

Hi
I am trying to profile a very simple ASP.Net 2.0 web application. I follow these steps:

- From Profiler project wizard, I choose "Profile Performance"
- Select "Asp.Net web application", and point it to a localhost app.
- Select "finish", and start profiling

The profiler gives these progress messages:
Initializing..., Stopping IISADMIN, and then stops.

At this point, IIS is stopped, and nothing happens after this. The status bar of Ants Profiler shows:
Ready to profile performance of ASP.Net web application: /TestWebSite/

Everytime I try to profile it, same steps get repeated. IIS is stopped and then nothing.

Can anyone please tell me what am I doing wrong. The web application is running fine on its own. Just a hello world page.

I have .Net framework 2.0 release version on my machine (and not 1.1)
OS is XP with Service Pack 2
IISAdmin NT service is set to "Automatic" mode


Thanks
Niraj

Brian Donahue

Hello Niraj,

Although this happens sometimes with ANTS Profiler because of an IIS configuration change (usually you can run IISRESET from a command prompt to clear things up in that respect), I'd advise you to install .NET Framework 1.1 alongside 2.0 for starters, because ANTS Profiler does not work properly with Framework 2.

To clarify, you can profile applications that are targeted to 2.0 (you need ANTS Profiler 2.6 for this, though), but the Profiler software itself will exhibit strange behaviour on 2.0.

Hopefully installing Framework 1.1 will fix the problem.

nkumar

Hi

Thanks for the quick reply.

I installed .Net Framework 1.1, restarted IIS couple of times, and restarted the machine too. Nothing helped.

Is there any other setting in IIS/machine.config etc. I can play with to resolve this ? Does ANTS have some kind of Log/Debug flag I may set to check whats going on ?

Thanks a lot
Niraj

Brian Donahue

Hello,

You can create a logs subfolder in the ANTS Profiler program folder, then restart the ANTS Profiler Service in Windows. This will create a few text logs of ANTS Profiler's actions.

I don't know how useful it will be to look at these in your case, since the IIS restart is one of the very first steps in profiling ASP .Net. By all means give it a try and let us know what you find out.

chrisw

I have the same issue trying to profile IIS.

Basically it wont shut down IIS and the couple of times it did it disabled all other application pools and looked like it attached to the default website.

The really bad thing was I have been reading how great this profiling software is, and obviously installed a trial version a few months ago and had the same issues but gave up, this time because the trial had expired I decided on word of mouth to purchase a copy.

If I can't get it going can I get a refund?

Regards
Chris

Brian Donahue

Chris,

Code profiling imposes some limitations on web sites. When we profile ASP .NET code, we need to restart the process running the ASP .NET code, whether it is ASPNET_WP.exe, or w3wp.exe, adding a special environment variable. We do this in basically the same way that you would when you debug web application code.

We need to take IIS all the way down to the IISADMIN service to get the configuration changes to take effect. After this, ANTS gets a list of all services dependent on IIS and restarts them. Sometimes this doesn't happen correctly.

In one case, it was a third-party service that someone had hooked into IIS that wouldn't restart for some unknown reason. Maybe it's worth looking into disabling any third-party applications that run on IIS that are unnecessary?