JetBrains .NET Tools Blog

We have recently crossed the bounds of our specialization to set a world record in data transfer rate by throwing a 450GB file from one machine to another in only 1 minute! It was surprisingly easy: all we had to do was find a fast-running developer and equip the guy with an HDD!
Fake world records aside, only 4 months since our previous milestone, we’ve collected and successfully opened a 450GB snapshot. We mean it. Anyone ever seen a .NET profiler lifting that much weight?

Sometimes during profiling sessions you notice that your application is running slow or hanging, only to realize that you have not turned off a debug switch. After that, you have to reprofile everything.
Other times, after hours of continuous profiling, you optimize a consuming method, and again, you have to start from scratch to see if the optimization actually worked.
We thought we could provide a less time-consuming option for scenarios like these.
Starting from version 4.0, dotTrace will be able to recalculate a snapshot without reprofiling your application. Just ask “what if this function is removed” or “what if I optimize this function by 40%” and get a prompt answer from dotTrace: it will display new time values and compare them to the old ones.

Back in the days when R# 4.0 was still in the making, we were profiling it heavily in order to, you know, make sure it wouldn’t suck all your hardware resources out. Time and again we were getting thousands and thousands of threads accumulated in snapshots. Obviously, merging them was a real challenge.
Why, we thought, couldn’t R# guys be more accurate with threads, and wondered whether we would ever get a complete snapshot.
The thread exuberance issue in R# was eventually solved, but you know what? Even before that happened, dotTrace had never ever gone crazy profiling the Most Intelligent Tool for Visual Studio.
The message is: whenever you have a zillion threads in your application, it’s not a problem for dotTrace - it’s a problem for you.

We just opened an 80Gb performance snapshot. It took dotTrace only 34 seconds after launch to show the call stack!

The downside: no more coffee breaks while snapshots are being opened!

Everybody knows that profilers throw OutOfMemoryException’s during multihour sessions with fatty applications. It’s just as certain as death, taxes and beer, isn’t it?

Well, the new version of dotTrace will apparently go its own way: profiler core now prefers InsufficientDiskSpaceException’s.

Yes, you got it right — we’ve improved dotTrace to handle tens and even hundreds of gigabytes of monitored data without running out of memory. Now only your hard drive is the limit!