Performance Explorer
Applies to: 
Visual Studio 
Visual Studio for Mac
Note
This article applies to Visual Studio 2017. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here
The Visual Studio Profiling Tools let developers measure, evaluate, and target performance-related issues in their code. These tools are fully integrated into the IDE to provide a seamless and approachable user experience.
Profiling an application is straightforward. You begin by creating a new performance session. In Visual Studio Team System Development Edition, you can use the Performance Session Wizard to create a new performance session. After a performance session ends, data gathered during profiling is saved in a .vsp file. You can view the .vsp file inside the IDE. There are several report views available to help visualize and detect performance issues from the data gathered.
Profiling Tools can also be used from the command line. This allows users the flexibility of running these tools from the command line or using them to automate tasks that use script.
For more information about current and advanced topics related to performance and profiling, search the Microsoft Developer Network for topics and Microsoft blogs. Use the keywords Enterprise Performance Tools Team.
Common tasks
| Task | Related Content |
|---|---|
| Techniques for Windows 8 and later | Performance tools on Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 applications |
| Understand profiling concepts: Learn the concepts and terms that you will use to collect, view, and analyze code performance using the profiling tools. | Overviews |
| Jump in and do it: Learn the basic procedures that you will use when you collect, view, and analyze code performance by using the profiling tools. Try it out with a hands-on walkthrough. | Getting started |
| Configure a profiling session: Learn advanced methods of how to specify the projects or binaries to profile, select a profiling method, choose the performance data to collect, and set other profiling session options. | Configure performance sessions |
| Control the data that the profiler collects: Learn how to use performance session properties and interactive procedures to start and stop profiling, and how to limit the performance data that you collect to just the information that you want. | Control data collection |
| Locate performance issues: Learn how to view and analyze the collected performance data in the Profiling Tools Report view window. | Analyze performance tools data |
| Analyze performance changes: Learn how to compare two profiler data files to analyze performance changes. | Compare performance data files |
| Save and share your results: Learn how to save profiling data for archiving or sharing. | Save and export performance tools data |
| Automate profiling: Learn to use profiling tools from the command prompt. | Profile from the command line |
| Control profiling programatically: Learn how to use the managed and native Profiling Tools APIs to control data collection directly from source code. | Profiling Tools APIs |
| Troubleshoot profiling issues | Troubleshoot performance tools issues |