I forgot to mention the other day that a new version of the CLR Profiler is available for download. Here’s a link to an earlier entry where I wrote about using it to dissect SharpReader’s memory usage.

From the website: “The CLR Profiler includes a number of very useful views of the allocation profile, including a histogram of allocated types, allocation and call graphs, a time line showing GCs of various generations and the resulting state of the managed heap after those collections, and a call tree showing per-method allocations and assembly loads.“

I’ll be the first to admit that the CLRProfiler is an awesome tool to see what’s going on under the hood of your applications. After seeing Rico’s talk a few months ago, i’ve been working on adopting three of his ‘tenets’ into my work: Measure everything, know what things cost, and brew a “performance culture” surrounding any code that I write or test.

Finally, if you really want to dive into the murky depths of object allocation, I can’t recommend enough the importance of understanding the .NET Profiler API’s. Another MSDN article on the topic is here.