I saw a mail this week asking how you can determine what bitness your process is running in, and one of the suggestions was to check for the PROCESSOR_ARCHITEW6432 environment variable. If that variable exists, you know you're on 64 bit Windows in a 32...

This week, I encountered a test scenario which makes use of an XmlSerializer on it's startup path. Unfortunately, MSDN's documentation for the type is not clear on the performance impact of using an XmlSerializer. The documentation on introducing XML...

Testing performance is tough. As a product is being developed, you need to track the performance of what you're building. The question is how often? It turns out it's a very difficult and time consuming thing to identify the cause of failures in a...

I started this, as most do, with the best of intentions. A long list of topics to discuss, potentially interesting things to say, and so forth. Then, as is usual, life interrupted. So, I put forth the question to the proverbial teeming masses of the...

Timing your code One of the fundamental aspects of performance testing is identifying how long it will take you to execute the code you’re writing. There are a few ways you can measure this: measuring time elapsed while your code executes, computing...

[Housekeeping stuff. I added categories. Neat stuff.] RichB asked me yesterday in the comments to my first post: “What are the range of metric values I should expect to see for a given scenario. For example, how many gen1 collections per minute...

I never quite know how to start something like this without sounding a bit goofy. “Hi there” seems odd, seeings as I have no real idea who I'm talking to yet. Ah well. My name is Bill Wert. I'm a Software Test Engineer on the CLR Performance...