Use Process Explorer To Quickly Identify Performance Bottlenecks In ASP.NET Web Applications

Process Explorer is my best friend when I need to quickly identify potential performance bottlenecks for ASP.NET web applications. When I am called onsite I have it always with me. It served me well recently so I thought it'd be proper to show my appreciation to the tool and to the creator, Mark Russinovich, by sharing how I use it. Every time I am called onsite to the customer's, first thing I ask to install ...ehm... copy the tool to the server in question. It usually shows hot spots right away and helps making assumptions and decisions.

by tacit requiem

CPU Usage History

This view helps to spot "unusual" activity for ASP.NET Web Application. When I see "too much" red color in this view I start asking question "Why Managed .Net Code performs privileged operations?" From my observations it mostly caused by excessive usage of threading.

• Pitfalls With .Net Multithreading And COM Objects – Threads Must Have Compatible Apartment Models (MTA vs. STA)
• Improve ASP.NET 2.0 Performance With PageAsyncTask - Multithreading For The Masses

Private Bytes Memory

This view has become my favorite recently as I was involved in few cases with memory leakage. I think the picture is self explanatory.

• Identifying Memory Leak With Process Explorer And Windbg

I/O Bytes History

This view helps me spotting potential I/O bottlenecks.

• Performance Sin - Chatty Database Access And Loops (Plus Another Free Performance Tool)
• ASP.NET Performance Sin - Serving Images Dynamically (Or Another Reason To Love Fiddler)

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