[daeken]

This was my thought as well. While memory profilers tend to be fairly useless in my experience, disregarding them simply because they degrade the performance of your application (and really, 3-4x in the case of YourKit is astoundingly good) is silly. Heavy use of a debugger will also degrade the performance of your application -- should we not use debuggers, even when they're the right tool for the job?

[dkersten]

memory profilers tend to be fairly useless

In my own experience I've had quite a bit of success with the valgrind family of tools when I was debugging memory leaks in a GSM message codec (written in C, not a managed language) I wrote a few years ago. I guess it depends on the nature of the code and memory leaks.

I've also had some success tracing memory use with VisualVM for the purpose of finding out where memory is allocated so it could be used more efficiently (both for performance and do prevent leaks).