Our 2012 Q3 release is in the books, and now that we have a moment to reflect on what we’ve accomplished with JustTrace, we are very proud of how much we were able to achieve in just 4 short months. The highlights for this release include the completely new user interface and the massive improvement to the user experience when doing performance profiling. Overall user interface speed and responsiveness have been dramatically improved which makes JustTrace much nicer to use.
The new UI is very streamlined, even first-comers will have no trouble navigating from the starting hub through the New Profiling Session page and dive straight into exploring and solving performance or memory issues. Context help is available at every step by pressing F1 or clicking the help button in the upper right corner.
Just pick the kind of application to profile, enter the path to the app and hit Run. In this release we’ve added support for profiling Windows Store .NET apps as well as web sites hosted in IIS 8 or IIS Express. In the screenshot below I’m profiling JustTrace itself using the memory profiler.
We’ve done massive improvements to the performance profiler. Instead of fiddling with snapshots, JustTrace now features a timeline of the application’s execution. Select any time interval that seems interesting (e.g. has high CPU usage) and JustTrace will show you what was going on in your app during that interval – call stacks complete with timings and hit counts, a list of methods and finally a list of hot spots found. The timeline can also be used to compare two intervals on the timeline (akin to the old Compare To… option) or compare two intervals from different processes. No features from the previous version were left out in the new UI! All filtering, navigation and search functions are now concisely laid out in the ribbon bar. As an added bonus the performance profiler is as much as 6x faster than before (i.e. results in 6x less slow-down for the profiler app), while providing more relevant call stacks and timings at the same time.
We’ve also made improvements to the memory profiler. Memory usage during snapshot analysis has been decreased dramatically – apps consuming large amounts of memory can now be much more comfortably profiled with JustTrace without fear of running out of memory. Another improvement worth mentioning, one that many users requested in their feedback is that the GC root paths diagram now shows the names of the fields that hold references to objects in the graph.
Yes, very proud, indeed.