Good .NET profiling tools?

[Jaxidian]

Anybody know of any good .NET profiling tools (VS Team Dev Edition is not an option)? Free would be good but inexpensive is acceptable. Specifically we're wanting to track down some performance issues in a 5-tier system and it would be nice to not have to spend hours/days figuring out where they are.

Thanks in advance!

 

[KB]

This one is pretty good: http://www.red-gate.com/products/ants_profiler/index.htm

But I will save you the time and money and tell you that the reason you are having performance problems is that you are using a 5-tier system. When people talk N-tier they usually mean 3-tier. 5 is an awful lot of layers and very difficult to debug. What would require so many layers?

Usually you do:
DB->Web Service/Middleware->UI What are your other layers?

 

[lozina]

nprof is pretty good and free

 

[InfiniteLurker]

I'll second the Ants profiler recommendation mentioned above.

Also, overall memory use and leaks can drastically impact performance, and my tool of choice for that is the SciTech Memory Profiler. If you're new to it, be sure to run through the tutorials on the website to get the hang of tracking things down. That tool is worth it's weight in gold * 100 in my opinion...

 

[kamper]

I've found the redgate stuff to be very useful for simpler stuff that was running slow (a custom list component that sorted like molasses) but I have no idea how well it would scale to 5 tiers. I think they have some sort of asp integration if that's what you're doing. I only used the trial though and didn't pay much attention to the pricing.

 

[daniel1113]

I haven't used Ants, but the other RedGate products are top notch. I use them on a daily basis and would highly recommend them.

 

[Jaxidian]

Awesome, thanks for the responses!

KB, we have the typical 3 tiers (presentation, business, data) and then we have the "glue" in between each of those 3 tiers to account for the other 2 tiers. Our presentation tier doesn't talk to our business tier while our business tier doesn't talk to our data tier. They all talk to their corresponding integration tiers, if that makes sense.

-Jax