Developer Division Performance Engineering blog

One of the most difficult things about our job is trying to decipher why Visual Studio is slow for a customer. Often it starts with a vague complaint (e.g. "Visual Studio is sluggish") which we then have to narrow down to a particular action that's slow...

Jason Zander just posted an article on Performance Troubleshooting Article and VS2010 SP1 Change , where he talks about some changes we made in SP1 and links to an article on Visual Studio (Performance) Troubleshooting . Check it out and let us know if...

We'd like to know what you think about Visual Studio 2010. We are especially interested in hearing about your experience with regards to performance , reliability , and quality . The more details you share with us in this survey, the better we can...

Since we shipped Visual Studio 2010 we've continued to have a small but notable series of complaints about performance that we've been able to attribute to bugs in video drivers and GPUs. The issue first came up back during VS 2010 beta in October...

If you're running Visual Studio 2010 on XP or Vista you may benefit from installing this upgrade: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981741 Applications that use Windows Automation APIs can significantly decrease Microsoft Visual Studio IntelliSense performance...

Brian Harry's just posted an article on configuring an ideal Visual Studio development machine. You can read about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2010/04/29/your-visual-studio-2010-dream-machine.aspx . By the way, if you scroll down and...

Continuing my answer to the mail I received recently from Uriel Carrasquilla… Uri’s note, reprinted in the previous post , refers to an "issue" associated with the current technique for measuring processor utilization in Windows. As my reply mentioned...

Being focused on the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2010 for the past six months or so, I, unfortunately, have been neglecting to blog about it. Before I get back to the series of blog posts I started about writing in parallel programming, I thought...

Brian Harry is continuing a great series of posts on VS2010 performance, you can read the latest in that series here ; where Brian talks about the issues we've been seeing around Virtual Memory Exhaustion and what we're doing to address it.

Brian Harry has posted a discussion of Intellisense performance improvements in VS2010 that we've made since Beta 2, including bothe before and after videos. He also touches a little on the massive performance effort we're making as a division to address...

I wanted to let you know about a last minute change that went into VS 2010 Beta 2 that you can use to improve the startup performance for the WPF and Silverlight Designer. The change went in late and it was a little risky, so we decided to leave it off...

[Note, this post is superceeded by a newer post here .] We’ve received a few performance complaints around Visual Studio 2010 (Beta 2) performance that can be traced to old video drivers or GPU virtualization issues. If you’re seeing...

Last week we shipped Beta 2 for broad distribution. Many of you have already sent us comments and improvement suggestions (thanks!) At this point we are down to our final set of bug fixing, perf tuning, etc. We’re very interested in your feedback so...

In the last blog entry in this series , I introduced the model for parallel program scalability proposed by Neil Gunther, which I praised for being a realistic antidote to more optimistic, but better known, formulas. Gunther’s model adds a new parameter...

Recently, a colleague of mine, Mark Friedman, posted a blog titled “ Parallel Scalability Isn’t Child’s Play ” in which he reviewed the merits of Amdahl Law vs. Gunther’s Law for determining the practical limits to parallelization. I would not argue with...

Part 1 of this series of blog entries discussed results from simulating the performance of a massively parallel SIMD application on several alternative multi-core architectures. These results were reported by researchers at Sandia Labs and publicized...

In a recent blog entry , Dr. Neil Gunther, a colleague from the Computer Measurement Group (CMG), warned about unrealistic expectations being raised with regard to the performance of parallel programs on current multi-core hardware. Neil’s blog entry...

Soma’s been talking about the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 release on his blog , which means I’m starting to get questions about what type of hardware you’re going to need to run VS2010 on. Unfortunately, I can’t give you an official answer yet (other...

Over the past several weeks, I have been working overtime developing a presentation on web application performance to be given at the upcoming Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC), which is next week in Los Angeles. This is partly why I have been...

This is a continuation of Part IV of this article posted here . Note that a final version of a white paper tying this series of five blog entries together (and a Powerpoint presentation on the subject) are attached. For many years, the effort to...

This is a continuation of Part III of this article posted here . In the many-core era, the host processor overhead associated with processing TCP/IP interrupts is not a capacity problem, since CPU cycles on the host computer are plentiful and becoming...

We just announced the release of Service Pack 1 for VS 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 . A major push for this release was continuing to enhance performance and reliability, as Soma noted in his most recent blog entry . I want to take a minute to drill into the...

This is a continuation of Part II of this article posted here . By necessity, both the hardware and the software devoted to processing network traffic need to evolve in the many-core era to become multiprocessor-oriented. On servers that have NUMA...

This is a continuation of Part I of this article posted here . In Part 1 of this article, we looked at the capacity issues that are driving architectural changes in the TCP/IP networking stack. While network interfaces are increasing in throughput...

This post describes our recent investigation into an interesting performance problem: benchmarks that we were surprised to find running significantly faster than we expected on new hardware. Along the way we discuss useful benchmarking tools, how to validate...