CLR Profiler

The CLR Profiler is a tool designed to allow developers to see the allocation profile of their managed applications. More precisely, the application enables you to find out more about the methods allocated to the types of objects, what is on the collector heap, what objects survive and what actually keeps them alive. Then again, you should bear in mind that the project is no longer actively maintained and hence, it may not be suitable to use for apps you developed lately.

It is important to note that the program is quite intrusive and, according to the developer, you are likely to experience a slowdown between 10 to 100 in the applications you are profiling. Moreover, the log files created following the analysis can be quite large. Nevertheless, you can prevent ending up with a huge file that eats up all the space on your partitions by toggling the allocation and call logging.

The utility includes a number of very useful views of the allocation profile, including a histogram of allocated types, allocation and call graphs, a time line showing GCs of various generations and the resulting state of the managed heap after those collections, and a call tree showing per-method allocations and assembly loads.