Software Profiling minus the Midnight Oil equals ANTS Profiler

You have got to check this out

I've been using RedGate's tool for year.  Their SQLCompare and SqlDataCompare are essential parts of my toolbox.  Being more dev than DBA, these tool offer excellent functions for marrying up your dev databases to the production servers.  Even when you can't see your production databases, all the work is scripted so you can save the Sql files and send them on to your hosts.  Magic

Their latest offering, ANTS Profiler, is another high calibre tool that we've become very attached to.  We all like to write bullet-proof code which works lightening quick, but old habits die hard and it's often a thing we aspire to but never quite get there

we've been using a lot of LINQ lately using IQueryable results.  Alls well while you're coding them up and using them on your dev server.  However, combine thse results sets with 10,000 users all looking for the latest news and the code starts to get a bit laggy to say the least. 

We installed the ANTS profiles and it instantly identified these query's as the casue of a lot of the lag we were experiencing.  It seems they are still attached to the database in some manner as any subsequent access was still causing a call to the database , even though we'd stored them in an application variable.  We converted to List<> and the lag was a thing of the past.

There must be more to it but i'm miffed that all these new Microsoft tool are behaving like this.  Sure, they're a dream to code for ; LINQ style queries make up some of the most logical (from a coding perspective) syntax i've seen for a long time and object-oriented data access is somehting i've personally spent ages emulating in previous languages i've worked on.  Who would have thought that they'd be so expensive on the processor

If you're getting any kind of weird slow-down on your code, i can highly recommend the ANTS profiler.  Even if you're not, the profiler can still identify problematic sections of code and offer you some pointers.  We run everything through it now as a matter of course :¬)