Running the Visual Studio Profiler from the command line

Question

As part of an automated profiling system, i want to run the visual studio profiler from the command line.

According to all of the online documentation, i need to execute the following:

VSPerfCmd \start:sample /output:test.vsp /launch:Test.exe

VSPerfCmd is in my system path, and Test.exe is a HelloWorld C++ program compiled with VS2019 and located in the current directory. I am running the 32-bit version of the profiler and Test.exe is a 32-bit application. I get this error:

Error VSP1005: Command line error: Switch /launch:Test.exe is invalid. Aborting.

One of the guides in found mentioned running

VSPerfCLREnv /sampleon

before starting the profiler in sampling mode. However my version of the VSPerfCLREnv command does not recognize this parameter. Using the /Admin parameter for VSPerfCmd i installed and started the Profiler service, i am unable to start the kernel driver in the same way, but considering Test.exe is just a HelloWorld program, i don't think i would need it.

Has anyone used the command line profiler in VS2019 and can share how they made it work?

Answer 1

It seems that VSPerfCmd is no longer useable in Sampling mode in Windows 8 or above. Instead VSperf is used for sampling and VSPerfCmd for tracing.