Profiling Windows Azure Cloud Services

Hi again guys,

Last week I was working really close with performance related things of the web applications and this what I came across for Windows Azure Cloud services.

Profiling is one of the great feature of Visual Studio and I almost fell in love with it. why? because first of all its quite descriptive and helps to measure the memory / CPU monitoring of your application and second is it can be configured in both ways i.e. while running your application locally as well as while running your application in the cloud.

I will not go into much deeper on how to use this feature and how it helps, all you need to do is click on the link to know and you are done.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2s0xxa1d.aspx

You can use this great feature to go into the quite deeper understanding in terms of how your application is consuming resources on the server and it helps in deciding to scale up or scale down your application needs. More information on it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264994.aspx

But all right , lets come back to the Cloud arena and let see how can use this for Windows Azure cloud services.

basically you can use this feature while deploying your application using VS to cloud deployment wizard. (Publish)

A great article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh369930.aspx#BK_ProfilingCloudService which explains the approach about how you can do it pretty easily while deploying to Azure through your VS.

I was interested more on what special this VS does when we check the check box of Enable Profiling in the publish wizard? and here is what I found

Basically VS adds few entries in your cloud service definition and cloud service configuration files.

(I am using Windows Azure SDK 2.2)

In csdef
 <InternalEndpoint name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Caching.cacheArbitrationPort" protocol="tcp" />
  <InternalEndpoint name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Caching.cacheClusterPort" protocol="tcp" />
  <InternalEndpoint name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Caching.cacheReplicationPort" protocol="tcp" />
  <InternalEndpoint name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Caching.cacheServicePortInternal" protocol="tcp" />
  <InternalEndpoint name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Caching.cacheSocketPort" protocol="tcp" />

In cscfg
<Setting name="Profiling.ProfilingConnectionString" value="YourStorageAccount" />
<Setting name="CloudToolsDiagnosticAgentVersion" value="2.2" />

But then I also found that the size of the deployment packages increases when you enable this option of profiling, and that's because VS also adds the 64 bit profiler in your package.
So I am not sure about how you can use this feature when you dont want to publish using VS to your cloud service, however article http://michaelwasham.com/2011/08/10/deployment-to-windows-azure-fails-with-profiling-enabled/ explains how can you do it but as it is written for older version of SDK so I am doubtful if this works for later versions of Windows Azure SDK.

Overall profiling feature managed to impress me with with it's native integration with Windows Azure Cloud Services.

Once you enable the profiling and deploy the cloud service, VS 2012 Server explorer helps you in getting report out of your profiling build with just a single click and you are set to analyze the report.