Snapshot and Process Dropdown Lists

There are two dropdown lists that are used to select the snapshots to be presented by the profiler.

If more than one process is being profiled in the same session, then a dropdown list for process selection is also available (profiling more than one process per session is only available in the Enterprise edition). The process selector is used to select from which process the memory usage data should be presented.

The Show snapshot list is used to select the primary snapshot. The data about live instances are retrieved from this snapshot, and thus all instances presented in the Type/Resource/Filter details page and the Instance details page are part of this snapshot. This snapshot is referred to as the “primary snapshot” in this manual. This list contains all snapshots that have been saved.

The Comparison snapshot list is used to select the snapshot to be used as a reference snapshot. All data that are compared against some other data use this snapshot for comparison. This includes:

  • New instances (normal and disposed)

  • Removed instances (normal and disposed)

  • Delta instances (normal, disposed, undisposed, and memory leaks)

  • New, removed, and delta bytes

  • Allocs/sec (or Allocs) and Bytes/sec (or Bytes alloced)

  • Allocs/sec (or Allocs) in generation #0, #1, #2 and Large heap

This list always contains at least one entry called “Empty.” This is an empty snapshot that can be used when no comparison snapshot is wanted. This allows you to view all allocations that have been performed since the start of the profiler session.

Note

The snapshots presented in the Comparison snapshot list have always been collected prior to the snapshot selected in the Show snapshot list.

The snapshot selected using the Comparison snapshot dropdown list is referred to as the “comparison snapshot” in this manual.

This document also uses the term “between snapshots,” which refers to the allocations and memory usage changes that have occurred between the snapshot selected in the Show snapshot list and the snapshot selected in the Comparison snapshot list.