Resources on using Stackify Prefix?

[jzabroski]

I found it interesting that Prefix is listed here.

We use Stackify at work for APM+, and while it is good for application monitoring, I must confess I have never used it successfully for profiling. I tried, but the whole "edit this config file to configure which types you want to trace in detail" was very unsuccessful for me.

Traditionally, I have used:

• https://memprofiler.com/ - .NET Memory Profiler for debugging WPF memory leaks, plus some tips and tricks I learned from Dr. WPF
• RedGate ANTS Profiler - I love using their memory tree to find where a dangling reference isn't getting cleared up. Combined with Reflector it lets me see exactly why a third party lib is causing my application to leak memory, and I can submit bug reports to the third party saying "fix this line!"
• JMeter for load testing to discover interactions not typically visible in a basic benchmark, such as IIS AppPool restarts due to running out of memory, which will coincide with responses/second dropping sharply indicating some major loading or garbage collection task is running

[adamsitnik]

@sporty81 could you please say something more about profiling with Stackify? (it was added in #13)

[sporty81]

Our two products, Prefix & Retrace are very much profilers. They are powered by the .NET CLR profiling APIs. They are a very different type of profiler than something like ANTS though.

We focus on profiling an entire web request or transaction to identify the performance of it and what application dependencies were used that could be impacting performance, among other things we do. Our products are used during dev, QA, and production for troubleshooting and monitoring. Our products are safe for production being the profiling is very lightweight.

More traditional profilers focus on line level or method level performance statistics. They are almost never used in production due to their high level of overhead.

Prefix is similar to Glimpse and the MiniProfiler.

Check out this article to learn more on the subject: List of .Net Profilers: 3 Different Types and Why You Need All of Them