Receiving System.OutOfMemoryException When Profiling App

Question

This is my first time using the Performance analysis features in Visual Studio, so please bear with me. I am running Visual Studio 2010 SP1 on a Windows 7 system. I ran the Launch Performance Wizard item from the Analyze menu so that the analysis was setup properly. I also edited the Performance Session to add some additional counters to keep track of.

I ran the session, with it starting the app (which is an ASP.NET web application with SQL DB). It seemed to launch the page, but when I selected an item from the app, there didn't seem to be a post-back. I waited for quite some time as I figured there was some overhead to profiling the app. However, it never responded. So, I stopped the profiling session. It took quite some time to digest the .etl file it created (687MB). When it came to building the report though, it created the report file, but eventually gave a System.OutOfMemoryException.

The fact that it would give an out of memory exception on a system running 16GB of RAM, i7-2720QM 2.2GHz multi-core CPU, Windows 7 64-bit, 349GB free drive space, etc. It makes me assume there's something else going on here. I also see while it's processing the report that it goes from about 800MB of memory use up to about 2.8GB in small steps. Then it sharply drops back to the 800MB or so mark and does it all over again, over and over.

Anyone have any ideas on what I can do?

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Nathon Dalton
Sr. Software Engineer
Systems Administrator
Network Administrator
Blog: http://nathondalton.wordpress.com

Answer 1

Hi Nathon,

Thank you for posting in the MSDN forum.

Maybe you could share us the detailed error message.

The Visual Studio Profiling Tools let us measure, evaluate, and target performance-related issues in the code. Generally, the exception “System.OutOfMemoryException” that is thrown when there is not enough memory to continue the execution of a program like this thread.

Best Regards,

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Jack Zhai [MSFT]
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us

Answer 2

Are you doing just CPU sampling, and the sampling for the counter you added? Are you doing Instrumentation?