What is a code profiler?
In software engineering, a profiler is a tool used to help you analyze the performance of your applications to improve poorly performing code. Profiling and diagnostics tools help you diagnose memory and CPU usage and other application-level issues. With these tools, you can collect performance data while you run your application.
If you’re a developer who’s been on-call for your team’s codebase or you’ve written a web app, then you may have asked yourself why your app is receiving slow response times? Often, the issues are in production, and it is challenging to investigate at that moment, but profiling tools can help you capture enough information and evidence of the issue.
There are several ways to diagnose performance issues when you’re working with APIs, but using a profiler can help you quickly identify and rule out possible causes so that you have a clear path in resolving your issue.
A profiler can help you make informed decisions quickly by providing a visual depiction of execution times and CPU usage for your application. It’s much easier and quicker to understand issues and fix them when you can see a graph of the execution times or the CPU usage.
Learn to use the profilers
The following articles and blog posts provide more information to help you learn to use the Visual Studio performance tools effectively.
- Case study: Beginner's guide to optimizing code
- Isolate a performance issue
- Improving Visual Studio performance with the new Instrumentation Tool
- Case Study: Double performance in under 30 minutes