I have several customers where my WinForms app does not perform as well as at other customers. I use JetBrain’s dotTrace here in the office, but that does not help me find bottlenecks on the machines of our customers. How can I profile the performance of a .NET app already deployed to a customer? Are there any profiling tools with a redistributable component that lets me produce profiling results that cannot be used until I bring the results (a snapshot in dotTrace) back to the full profiling tool?
Update: Since NProf is freely distributable, I’m thinking about deploying it to a customer’s workstation. I will report the results here.
I’m not familiar with dotTrace, but I have used the Visual Studio 2008 instrumentation and profiling tools in the context of Visual Studio and I believe they are distributed with .NET 3.5 SDK.
The VSInstr.exe tool: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182402.aspx will instrument the deployed binary.
VSPerfCmd: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182403.aspx can capture the performance data from the instrumented app.
I’ve never done it directly and solely from the command line, so I can’t offer you much help there, but I figured this was another option for you, at least.