9 Essential Tools to Detect Performance Issues in .NET

23 March 2022 at 10:00 by ParTech Media - Post a comment

One of the best aspects of being a .NET developer is having access to some of the best performance tools. These tools help you to identify various ASP.NET performance issues and solve them. In this post, we will first look into some important performance issues in .NET and then go through the different tools.

Table of contents

  1. Main performance issues in .NET
  2. 9 essential tools to detect and fix performance issues in .NET
  3. Conclusion

Main performance issues in .NET

Here are some of the major issues related to performance in .NET -

Logs and exceptions are one too many: Exceptions in.NET are not a terrible thing. Only mistakes are undesirable. This is what the vast majority of developers believe. And this is true if exceptions are handled correctly, that is, thrown, caught, and treated (and NOT ignored). But too many exceptions and logs can complicate the process and impact the performance. As they say, too many cooks ruin the broth, and exceptions are no exception.

Overuse of thread synchronization and locking: Inter-process mutexes, Reader/Writer locks, and other thread synchronization options are usually available in the .NET Framework. Now, there will be instances when a.NET developer writes code in such a way that only one thread can be served at a time. And other parallel threads will be waiting to be processed in a queue. This can impact the performance.

Application hangs: It's one thing to deal with when a certain URL is slow. But it doesn't get any worse when the IIS website simply hangs, and all or most web pages take an eternity to load. A hang usually occurs when a program is overloaded or blocked. .NET applications frequently encounter two sorts of application hang scenarios: a hard hang(IIS Issue) and a soft hang(ASP.NET issue)

Infrastructure at Fault: The Microsoft.NET Framework is not a stand-alone tier. A.NET Framework application will have a lot of dependencies on the underlying infrastructure, such as virtualized servers, containers, or cloud infrastructure. Then there's the possibility of backend storage devices. While these aren't directly related to.NET, a failure with any of these infrastructure components could have an impact on.NET performance.

9 essential tools to detect and fix performance issues in .NET

Following are the tools used for detecting and fixing performance issues in .NET:

Visual Studio Profiling Tools: Visual Studio comes with excellent profiling tools for locating bottlenecks and sluggish processes right out of the box. The Diagnostics Tools is one such tool. This view is ideal for displaying an overview of all of your website's resources. If you want to go deeper, though, it is recommended to use the Performance Profiler.

.NET Code Profilers: A excellent code profiler is your best ally if you're trying to improve the performance of your code line by line. They're ideal when you have a console app and want to run a method 1,000 times to fine-tune CPU and memory utilization. They're also helpful for finding hot routes in your code when coupled to existing Windows Services or ASP.NET apps.

.NET Application Performance Management(APM): Application performance management tools are made to perform lightweight code profiling on every single web request without slowing down your applications. They can gather all the high-level information you need to identify typical performance issues and continuously monitor your production apps to ensure they are always up and running.

Real User Monitoring: The majority of APM vendors also offer real-time user monitoring. There is also a slew of tools that specialize in simply real-time user monitoring, such as load balancer tools.

Windows Performance Counter: Microsoft includes numerous built-in metrics for the CLR, ASP.NET, IIS app pools, and other areas. Garbage collection, request queuing, memory utilization, CPU usage, HTTP error rates, and many more are among the most critical ones to measure when it comes to performance.

Key Performance Indicators(KPIs) Custom Metrics: Creating and measuring your own custom application metrics is one of the most effective ways to track the success of your app. You can create your own Windows performance counters, use statsd, or use a variety of third-party services to measure your own custom data.

Web Server(IIS) Access Logs: You may rapidly open or tail your IIS log files to see how long it takes a specific request to load. You could even aggregate all of them, analyze them, and query them to find out what your most frequently utilized queries are, as well as what your slowest requests are. If you're attempting to keep track of them on your own, it can be difficult. You can also send all of your logs to a third-party log management solution that will help you search and see them all. If you don't have an APM solution, one approach to accomplish basic ASP.NET performance monitoring is to parse your IIS logs.

ASP.NET Failed Request Tracing: Failed request tracing is a lesser-known and less-used capability of IIS. It can be used to track a lot of information about IIS requests that fulfill particular configuration conditions. You can program them to respond to specific HTTP status codes, time spent, or event severity levels.

Exception Tracking: Application exceptions are one of the most common reasons for performance issues. When an exception is thrown, the thread comes to a halt while the stack trace is gathered. Even seemingly innocuous handled exceptions might cause significant performance bottlenecks when the service is overloaded. To detect critical problems, new errors, and track error rates over time, it's necessary to aggregate and monitor all of your exceptions. Every development team needs an error or bug tracking tool in their arsenal.

Conclusion

There are the top ASP.NET performance tools available at your disposal. You can choose one or more of these tools depending on what you're attempting to achieve. Every tool is unique, and you’re most likely to use all these tools described here at some point in your developer life. It is quite beneficial to at least be aware of your possibilities.

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