Profiling .NET Assembly hosted by MMC

steve@rto

We have a .NET assembly that is hosted as a snap-in inside MMC via Ironring Software's MMCLib wrapper. We have recently noticed a performance issue in our snap-in and have been trying to use the ANTS profiler to diagnose. We set up mmc.exe as the executable to profile, and selected to profile All .NET Methods in the configuration wizard. When we attempt to start profiling, we receive a warning message that mmc.exe is not a .NET executable. We click OK and MMC does run. We let the snap-in run for a few minutes, then we shut down MMC. At this point, the ANTS profiler never notices that MMC is no longer running (i.e. it thinks that we're still profiling, even after MMC has been terminated for 30 minutes). If we manually stop profiling, we get no results.

Are we setting something up incorrectly, or is there an issue with profiling a .NET assembly hosted inside a native-mode executable?

Brian Donahue

Hi Steve,

You may have come across an issue with ANTS Profiler where closing the window on a multithreaded application that you're profiling will not cause ANTS Profiler to stop the profiling. ANTS will stop profiling only if you trap the MMC window's close event and terminate all of the threads in your code.

Until we can get this resolved, you can use the snapshot function while the MMC is running to get results rather than waiting for ANTS Profiler to determine that the application has quit.