ASP.NET Performance Toolset

Any consultant can streamline ASP.NET Application performance troubleshooting process when he has a good toolset handy. By “good” I mean the tools are well known and it is free. These two attributes usually help passing security department smoothly and never meet procurement department too. These departments are well known road blockers. For a reason…

Before I go onsite I usually ask a customer to get the following tools into the customer’s network. Do not have to install it, just make it available internally. Quite a few customers have rigorous procedures of getting software into internal network so having it beforehand saves a lot of idle time.

• Debugging Tools for Windows or WinDbg(both 32 and 64 versions). The tools are available free for download here - Windows Debugging Tools. Related content:
  • Getting started with windbg - part II
  • WinDBG Walkthrough - Dump Values Of DataSet or DataTable
  • Identifying Memory Leak With Process Explorer And Windbg
  • ASP.NET Performance: Dynamically Loaded Assemblies Cause Application Recycles (Problem and Solution)
  • Avoid Manipulating Passwords In Memory - It Is Easy To Reveal
  • Setting a Breakpoint. Part1. Part 2. Part 3
  • Call Stacks. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3
  • Threads. Part 1. Part 2
  • Thread Stacks. Part 1. Part 2
  • Managed Heap. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5
  • Breaking on an Exception. Part 1. Part 2
  • Locks
  • Investigating Locks
• Sysinternal’s DebugView. DebugView is a great tool for collecting instrumentation made with System.Diagnostics.Trace object. Related content:
  • DebugView - Free Simple Tool To Quickly Identify Performance Problems
  • ASP.NET Data Binding Performance – Collection Is More Expensive Than Datatable
  • Use Sysinternals DebugView To Diagnose The Application
• Sysinternal’s Process Monitor. Process Monitor or procmon is a monitoring tool that captures process, file system, registry, and network activity. Questions it can answer include “What process touches file X?”, “What files process X touches?”, “Under what identity the process runs? Is it impersonated?” The tool can be downloaded for free here - Process Monitor. Related content:
  • Cannot Install Visual Studio 2008 On Vista (Including Resolution)
  • Identity Flow Through Physical Tiers - Impersonation
  • Identity Flow Through Physical Tiers - Delegation
  • Identity Flow Through Physical Tiers - Protocol Transition
• Sysinternal’s Process Explorer. Process explorer shows detailed information about process status. It is lethal weapon, and it is free, download it here - Process Explorer. Related content:
  • Use Process Explorer To Quickly Identify Performance Bottlenecks In ASP.NET Web Applications
  • Identifying Memory Leak With Process Explorer And Windbg
  • ASP.NET Performance: Dynamically Loaded Assemblies Cause Application Recycles (Problem and Solution)
  • Use FREE Tools From IIS Resource Kit To Warm Up Your ASP.NET 1.1 Application By Batch Compilation
• [non-MS] dynaTrace AJAX edition. It is not Microsoft tool but I love it tons. It helps identifying IE performance problems mainly related to massive JavaScript and DHTML. Download it for free here - https://ajax.dynatrace.com. Related content:
  • Understanding Internet Explorer Rendering Behavior
• Fiddler. I just love Fiddler. It helps to identify many performance problems related how the HTML page is built – the size, amount of requests, caching, and more. Download it for free here – https://www.fiddlertool.com. Related content:
  • Free Web Performance Tools From Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, And IBM
  • Improve Web Application Performance By Reducing Number Of Http Requests - Fiddler To The Rescue
  • ASP.NET Performance Sin - Serving Images Dynamically (Or Another Reason To Love Fiddler)
• Network Monitor or Netmon (both 32 and 64 bits). Netmon is a general purpose network monitor and analyzer. Few of the questions it helps to answer are “What downstream servers my application accesses? How often?”, “What data flows between two servers and what network protocols are used?”, “Is the latency caused by the application or by downstream server it accesses?” Download it for free here - Microsoft Network Monitor (Netmon). Related content:
  • Distributed Architecture Drawbacks Revealed By Netmon(Bonus - TDS Parser Goes Public)
  • Man-In-The-Middle-Attack: Protecting Http Traffic With SSL Might Be Not Enough - Consider Protecting SQL Traffic Too

Related Book

• Ultra-Fast ASP.NET: Build Ultra-Fast and Ultra-Scalable web sites using ASP.NET and SQL Server