Thank god there’s now a .NET Compact Framework profiler available – we can now start to optimize our compact framework applications – and the best of the story: this one works well and is completely free.

Key features:

• The EQATEC Profiler is a code profiler, not a memory profiler.
  So it’s all about making your app run faster, not about tracking
  objects and memory.The report will tell you exactly how many times each method was
  called and how long it took. You can then speedup
  your application by optimizing just the most expensive methods.
• The profiler and viewer are very easy to use. The viewer
  in particular has been designed to make digging into the
  report easy and useful.Instead of
  “percent of total execution time”-bars and filters and stuff that look fancy,
  but are often useless in practice, we’ve made it easy for you to see and navigate to
  what really matters: the most expensive methods and their context.
• The overhead depends on the instrumentation-level and
  the application itself, but typically
  your app will only run 20-40% slower and become 30-50% bigger. This low overhead means you’re usually able to run your app just like
  normal, even for timing-critical code.
  
• “-and free means crap, right?”
  Well, not always. You know, some users have actually taken time to write us saying that we ought to charge them for this kind of
  quality tool. Really, its true!
  However, for now we’ve decided not to.
  

Source 1: http://www.eqatec.com/tools/profiler/features