Developer Division Performance Engineering blog

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...

Across the Developer Division, we have made a concerted effort to make Visual Studio 2008 the best performing and most scalable version of the application yet. (See Soma’s Blog entry from September 2007 for some of the details.) We’ve already had lots...

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...

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...

You probably already saw Soma’s Blog on the Beta for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 SP1 . If you can, please download and install the Beta quickly (be sure to read the readme for Visual Studio Professional and for Visual Studio Team System first)...

Part 1 of the slide presentation.

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...

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...

One of the intriguing aspects of the onset of the many-core processor era is the necessity of using parallel programming techniques to reap the performance benefits of this and future generations of processor chips. Instead of significantly faster processors...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Performance testing is essential to our quest to make Visual Studio provide a highly responsive user experience. We do performance testing early and often. Before a new feature is checked into the main branch, a test build is created, and 100 to 200...

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...

Intel briefed customers recently about the evolution of its processor architectures to support ManyCore processors. Highlights of the press briefing include announcing the quad-core Tukwila processor that supports the IA-64 Itanium architecture and a...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...