What features should a C#/.NET profiler have?

Question

This could be a borderline advertisement, not to mention subjective, but the question is an honest one. For the last two months, I\'ve been developing a new open source profiler

Answer 1

What I would like on a profiler:

• Should work on 32 and 64 bits
• Should have componentes for all tiers (client, application server, database) and some way to correlate between them. For instance, it would be nice to see how changes made to any of the tiers impact other tiers. That could help deciding on which tier to implement specific features.
• Command line interface for using with automated scenarios (build server, stress testing, etc)
• Should have a lightweight sampling mode and a more precise instrumented mode. The second one should impact execution measurements as less as possible.
• A GUI for ease of use and that should generate the necessary config files for using em comand line mode
• Generate results in a starndard format (if such thing exists) so I can consume the results with other tools
• Should also generate or export results to Visual Studio's format (*.vsp)
• Compare between two or more result files, to see the evolution or regression of the code base.
• Collect and correlate the target application data with PerfMon data of other processes running on each target machine to identify concurrent resource usage (Memory, Processor, Disk and Network I/O)
• Determine thresholds for which some alert mechanism should be invoked. Example of such would be to e-mail someone if a specific scenario takes more time than specified.
• Hability to attach and detach from a running process to collect sampling data without interfering with the target application. Must have for using on production sites.