Can I profile ASP.NET web projects with this application? I have a site that is compiled as a "web application project" (not the newfangled file system web site). I successfully generated a "bin (Profiled)" folder, then swapped it with the real bin folder. Sadly, that's as far as I got, as I received the exception:

[NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.]
EQATEC.Profiler.Private.RegisterAllMethods() +73
EQATEC.Profiler.Private.EnterMethod(Int32 magic, Int32 methodHandle) +83
CACEWeb.Global..ctor() +31
ASP.global_asax..ctor() in c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root\72a9be68\c3ee1baf\App_global.asax.db3svskn.0.cs:0

Do I need to try something else?

Thanks,
rouftop

Hi rouftop,

Yes, it should work for ASP.NET but no, I don't have an exact explanation for what you see. I can offer some suggestions, though.

The generated runtime-module appear to run out of memory. I say "appear to" because the method offsets in the callstack are to the jitted code so I can't match it precisely to the offending MSIL-instruction, but the indications are quite reliable.

That part is about loading the method-names. They are compressed, so even 35,000 profiled method's names (that's the most I've tried, from NASA's World Wind app) only take up 300K or so. None of the reason why this could fail are very likely:

1) Have you profiled an incredible large number of methods, like millions? But still, it should be no problem.
2) Do you have very limited memory, ie less that the size of the generated runtime-module? Again, not very likely.
3) Is there maybe something special about your ASP.NET app that place a low limit on the memory available to your process?
4) Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. Maybe there's a bug somewhere.

If you mail us the generated runtime-module (the EQATECProfilerRuntime.dll) we'll be happy to take a look at it. That dll should be sufficient for us to examine the problem, because the information that the runtime-module seems to be choking on is contained within itself. Just send it to tools@eqatec.com.

best regards,
Richard

Hmm, none of those sound like my system. There certainly aren't millions of methods, I have 3.5 GB of RAM, it's all standard ASP.NET stuff. I'll email you the runtime, let me know what you find!
rouftop

Problem solved (and email-reply sent to rouftop).

An error happened during profiling and it should have resulted in a runtime-module that would give this mesage if you ran the app anyway: "This application was not successfully profiled. Run the profiler again and fix any reported errors."

Due to a bug this message was not produced. Instead, the runtime-module failed with a nullpointer-exception. Not very nice.

We've made a new release, 1.2.60. The only change is this one small bugfix.