Rico Mariani's Performance Tidbits

It's time for another quiz! A very short one this time. If I need some thread local storage and I might need several entries should I use: Thread.GetData(slot) and Thread.SetData(slot, object) or should I make my own static member like this ...

Well I think it's raining ReaderWriterLocks this month! Jeff Richter has an article on MSDN that goes over a lot of the basics and some stuff that's a lot more than basic. And then there's Vance Morrison's March article on the subject as well. Lots of...

Well the trouble with simple samples like the one I provided in part 1 is that well... they're too simple. Some of the improvements that you can make in them won't work generally. But nonetheless I think there's some interesting discussion possibilities...

Oh boy, more locking problems for the weekend! Here's a more complicated lock that often gets used when it shouldn't and is avoided when it should be used. Like the other articles in this series I'll provide a bit of code and ask for comments, it's...

Of course when I say "solution", I really mean "my solution" because there's not really just one way to do this. But this is an approach I like and I'll go over why I like it. Recall the code from the original problem : (there was some very interesting...

Continuing in what's turned into my series on locking advice, I have a new example for you of a typical problem that happens in class design. As usual I've simplified this almost to the point of being silly to illustrate the problem. Hopefully the crux...

Well I didn't mean to but it seems I'm writing a series of articles on locking. Based on my last posting I got several requests for a simple example of a case that could be improved with simpler locking. Here's something of that ilk that's similar...

A few days ago I posted a concurrency problem for commentary and I got a very nice set of responses. Now I can't say that there is any answer to this problem that I would say is universally correct but there are some interesting observations that we...

I've had a bit of a locking/threading theme in some of my recent postings so I thought I'd continue that with a little problem. Here's a (simplified) set of operations that is sort of an example of what you might need to do in a free threaded class. Let...

This isn't exactly a quiz because you couldn't possibly know the answer unless you were there or are pyschic but it's a fun result anyway so I thought I'd share. If you've ever read my mini-bio anywhere you'll know that this is actually my second stint...

A while ago I wrote about how you often win the performance war 5% at a time . The theme of that article was essentially that if you are finding huge performance wins, especially from just the most basic performance reports, that's usually a sign that...

I was just going through some memory leak information and I stumbled across a newish posting from Tess: http://blogs.msdn.com/tess/archive/2006/03/27/561715.aspx This is a great little article with lots of juicy details very much in the spirit...

I sometimes see funny locking patterns because there is a mental assumption that the lock keyword (via Monitor features of the runtime) automatically guards the contents of the locked region. This isn't the case. All that is guaranteed is that only one...

Well you'll recall that in the Performance Quiz #9 solution there was a surprising result where Test7 was actually faster than Test5 even though they appear to be doing basically exactly the same work. So my new challenge to you was to see if you can...

Last week I posted Performance Quiz #9 for discussion. Well the comments have been just awesome and many people went right ahead and measured the results. Some of you have discovered the key point in this particular test: Arrays are magic. In the...

A short and sweet quiz with lots of juicy discussion possibilities: public int Sum( IList < ushort > indices) { int result = 0; for ( int i = 0; i < indices.Count; i++) result += indices[i]; return result; } Considering only the time it...

A great article on Winforms performance from a colleague http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/03/WindowsFormsPerformance/ Definately worth a read, thank you Milena!

My long time friend and colleague Jack Gudenkauf has joined the CLR as an architect http://blogs.msdn.com/jackg/archive/2006/02/06/526217.aspx I know Jack is expecting me to tell you all what a big loser I think he is but I'll surprise him by not...

There was one other Real Gem from my experience with Sidewalk so I thought I'd share that one too. I originally wrote this back in 2000 for an internal audience but here it is for you all now. Remember this is discussing performance on 1998 era hardware...

Before I worked on the CLR I spent several years in MSN. One of the big projects I worked on was "Sidewalk" which among other things offered a yellow pages service. A lot of this work was done under IIS with ISAPI extensions and you can imagine the fun...

Well I had so much fun with my parody of A Few Good Men that I got inspired when I was listening to Bonnie Tyler yesterday. So here's another cautionary tale, don't let this happen to your manager :) ----- Holding Out For A [Coding]...

It’s not easy to get good performance culture. Perhaps at first blush you might think that it would be easy. After all performance planning, like many other quality aspects, is about creating a better product for your customers in a better way. It...

Does everyone know Amdahl's Law ? This law talks about the best gain you can hope to achieve by a certain class of improvement. The most common place that it's used is in talking about what gains you might be able to get from making your algorithms...

I've changed jobs. Well, sort of :) For the Whidbey product release I was the performance architect on the CLR, and I can't even start to tell you how much fun that was. And how educational it was. So the bad news is I'm not doing that anymore....

And today we conclude our little saga with one final experiment, a little analysis and some comments. I hope you've enjoyed reading this series as much as I've enjoyed doing the experiments. First, as promised I created yet another version of this...