Profiling an application with Visual Studio – Memory allocation

I discussed the possibilities of CPU sampling and instrumentation data collection in the previous articles and now it is time to benchmark the application performance indicators that target the memory.

To test this feature out, I created another sample application. This time, it works with files and I tried to create a simulation of a memory-consuming process.

The setup
It is a simple C# Console Application with only one method – Main. All the code is executed inside that method and no calls to external libraries are made. Here is what it looks like:

using System;
using System.IO;

namespace ConsoleApplication
{
   class Program
   {
       static void Main(string[] args)
       {
           string[] fileList = Directory.GetFiles(@"D:\Temporary");

           foreach (string file in fileList)
           {
               Console.WriteLine("Getting bytes for " + file + "...");
               Console.WriteLine("Bytes for " + file + ": " + File.ReadAllBytes(file).Length);
           }

           Console.Read();
       }
   }
}

What this code does is it gets the file paths (given a specific source folder) and then reads the file contents for each file separately to a byte array. For large files, this process will allocate quite a bit of memory, so that is a perfect way to demonstrate the capacities of built in profiling tools when it comes to memory allocation benchmarking.

As you can see from the code I am showing here, I am referencing a path that points to a folder called Temporary. To test it out, I copied a set of small and not so small files over there (a bunch of large texture files and a movie). And that is pretty much everything that is needed to simulate intensive memory consumption.

Trying it out – getting and analyzing the results
To start the process, go to Analyze > Launch Performance Wizard and select .NET Memory Allocation (Sampling)

Read more: DZone

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