Performance analysis ...

For the past 8 months I have been working on improving the performance of applications and most of them happen to be ASP.NET web applications.Like they say, performance analysis and tuning is an iterative process. There are no shortcuts to improve the performance of an application.

Before I reveal a couple of tools that help developers identify performance bottlenecks in their applications, let me first talk about a few basic things - most often we (software developers) get feedback saying "the application is too slow (it sucks !)". Now, this is obviously not a welcome feedback. Novice developers might quickly say -"let's comment out all the time consuming code and the application is all set ;) " Well, that's not a bad idea, rather is an option at times.
Okay, what are the areas that a developer should concentrate on when we observe that applications are performing badly - here is the list:

• Memory usage and leaks
• CPU usage
• Amount of I/O (writing to disk, database, sockets, etc)
• Time to render the application UI (applicable to windows, web applications)

I tried the following tools and this post aims at helping those developers analysing and fine tuning the performance of applications:

Name of the tool	Purpose
VMMap	VMMap is a process virtual and physical memory analysis utility. It shows a breakdown of a process's committed virtual memory types as well as the amount of physical memory (working set) assigned by the operating system to those types. VMMap is the ideal tool for developers wanting to understand and optimize their application's memory resource usage.
MemProfiler	.NET Memory Profiler is a powerful tool for finding memory leaks and optimizing the memory usage in programs written in C# or any other .NET language. It helps in identifying memory leaks by collecting and comparing snapshots of .NET memory
ANTS Memory and Performance Profiler	Available as part of .NET Developer Bundle from RedGate, this is the most powerful and user-friendly performance profiler that can profile the CPU and memory utilization of a .NET application (including locally hosted WPF XBAP applications)
HTTP Watch, Firebug, YSlow	These tools help capture the time it takes to download content from the web server to the client. These tools are applicable when profiling web applications.