GroboTrace

GroboTrace is a lightweight .NET performance profiler. It is designed to run inside any .NET application 100% of its lifetime with relatively small performance overhead. This allows you to get an insight into current bottlencks of your app right in production environment.

Setup

1. Build GroboTrace using build.cmd script
2. On each host where you are going to use GroboTrace:
3. Create directory for profiler, e.g. C:\GroboTrace
4. Copy the following files to profiler directory:

Output\ClrProfiler.dll
Output\ClrProfiler.pdb
Output\GroboTrace.dll
Output\GroboTrace.pdb
Output\GroboTrace.Core.dll
Output\GroboTrace.Core.pdb

3. Set machine-wide environment variables:

COR_ENABLE_PROFILING = 1
COR_PROFILER_PATH = C:\GroboTrace\ClrProfiler.dll
COR_PROFILER = {1bde2824-ad74-46f0-95a4-d7e7dab3b6b6}

4. Create config file C:\GroboTrace\GroboTrace.ini with CRLF-separated list of process names you want to profile:

Foo.exe
Bar.Baz.exe

Known issues:

• GroboTrace currently does not play well with multi-AppDomain apps, i.e. ASP.NET web sites hosted in IIS.
• GroboTrace might cause crashes of ReSharper NUnit Test Runner in VisualStudio.
• Memory usage overhead is currently not as small as it could be (see #1).