A profiler may be detached from an actively running application by first sealing communications between the application and profiler, then evacuating the profiler by waiting for any profiler-modified or instrumented code to complete execution, profiler runtime code to complete execution, cleaning up any residual items from the profiler, and shutting down the profiler. The profiler may be operational in many different environments, including a managed environment such as a virtual machine and those environments having just in time compiling of executable code.