Crazy time values in profiler results

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I started using ANTS profiles 3.0 and I am getting absurd results. I profiled a few unit tests (using NUnit command line tool), profile showed in a summary page that execution time was about 2 minutes (which is correct), however all method related time values seem to be multiplied by thousands and millions. Individual code lines have times between 1 and 10 millions, and if I check "AllMethod" tab, then for example Dispose method on a database took 32600990000.0000 seconds to execute in total.

I have found an old thread in ANTS profiler 2.0 forum where it was confirmed that there were time computation problems on some machines, and that this was going to be fixed for the next version. Now the next version has come, and I would very much like to see the solution, especially since we just bought the profiler and need to be able to justify our purchase.

Thanks in advance
Vagif Abilov

Dave Mellors

ANTS Profiler could be producing strange timings due to the SpeedStep technology which is implemented in some mobile processors. SpeedStep was designed to improve the life of the processor, improve heat dissapation and power consumption and one of the ways it works is by adjusting the clock speed.

If you are using an Intel Mobile Pentium processor then you could quite possibly be using SpeedStep which you can normally disable through the bios or through an application in your systray.

Do you get the same results if you try profiling on another PC?

object

I did not try it on a different machine yet, but I am using pretty common Dell Latitude D820. Is there any way for me to get around this issues, since this is my main machine? I guess Intel mobile processors are in general common choice, so I must not be alone with this issue.

Dave Mellors

I can only go by the customers that I have contact with, but whilst the Intel Mobile processors are very good and very popular, the majority of developers and testers that I have dealt with use desktops rather than laptops.

The main advantage of SpeedStep is to improve battery life and I imagine that you will be running ANTS Profiler whilst connected to the mains power. If you disable SpeedStep whilst connected to the mains your battery life won't be affected, you can run ANTS Profiler and your PC would run faster as well (I think!).

I will discuss this with the profiler project manager to see what might be done in the future to improve things and report back to you, but for know the only workaround available is to disable SpeedStep.

object

Dave,

It was recommended to go to Power Applet in Control Panel and select the Always On option to disable SpeedStep. It helped although timings still look suspiciously high. For example, Mandelbrot's Form1.Main show now 62 seconds though the execution completed in 5-6. As long as times will increase proportionally and will not reach absurd values, this workaround should be sufficient.

Thank you very much for quick reply. I wonder if other profilers suffer from SpeedStep. If not, then I guess you have a challenge to solve :-)

Best regards!
Vagif

Dave Mellors

The problem with "absurd results" where timings of millions of seconds are seen, has been identified by our developers as an issue resolved by a hotfix from Microsoft. More information on this is available in the Incorrect timings on mobile processors knowledge base article at http://www.red-gate.com/messageboard/viewtopic.php?p=16328.

Thank you Vagif for your patience and for your help in diagnosing the problem.