Rico Mariani's Performance Tidbits

In my last posting I made some recommendations about how to drastically improve the evaluation process based on the key observations that even the basic operations required to evaluate the truth of the facts were quite costly -- more so than all of the...

The thing about performance work is that it's very easy to be fooled into looking into the wrong areas. That's why you want your changes to be firmly grounded in data whenever they can be. Or if you're planning, you want to be thinking about what your...

There were some great comments from the initial posting which I encourage you to read. Many people latched on to the fact that GetToken(...) is doing a whole lot of allocations which is not something you generally want to see in a low level parsing function...

I think I like parsers too much, I end up writing about them a lot. Maybe that's because about one program in three is, loosely speaking, a parser of some kind. All the more reason why we should be very good about writing them. Unlike some of my previous...

Visual Studio 2005 and and .NET Framework 2.0 are out the door! I'm unbelievably happy! In fact I'd written something sooner but I was sorta out celebrating :) Soma says it all right here -- short and sweet. I hope you all love it!

If it feels like getting good performance out of your application/library/service/whatever is more like "trench warfare" than it is like "shock and awe" then you're probably doing something right. The trouble with performance work is that the easy...

I've been working with Dave Broman for many years now on assorted projects and he's just started blogging, opening with a strong article on stackwalking issues when using the Profiling API. If you're interested in using the profiling API to help you...

I get many opportunities to review documents and processes in the course of my job, and sometimes they’re not even about performance. :) About 2 years ago I started seeing a goodly number of security related documents; and now increasingly I see things...

I mentioned the Whidbey improvements in this area, and their importance, in both of my talks but I only spoke briefly on those two notions at that time so several people approached me afterwards for more details. Jim Nakashima was one of them and he's...

I was talking about memory management issues -- and diagnosis with simple tools today. I promised to post an entry with the location of the various tools I mentioned and here it is: You can get information on windbg at this location . Vadump has usage...

I gave my first talk of two today. If you went there today and you're reading this perhaps you'll consider joining me tomorrow for the memory issues talk. It's more technical than this one was but I'll still try to make it fun. On the other hand perhaps...

Earlier this year we released a series of training videos, one of which was my own on CLR Performance Tips . We did a followup Q&A session in the form of an online chat -- I've been waiting for it to be added to the video page (previous link) like...

Believe it or not I actually spend a good amount of time thinking about my little quizzes hoping to come up with a small piece of code that illustrates a bunch of different things in a simple enough way that many people feel they can jump right in and...

Several people on the CLR team were visited a couple of weeks ago and we got a chance to talk about our PDC plans. This video has mine :)

Time for another quiz for you all, this is just a micro-benchmark so we want to be careful not to conclude too much but it's useful for understanding the costs and their origins. Consider the two snippets shown below: // choice #1, using Generics ...

I was talking to a friend earlier today about how much fun I've had blogging these many months now (soon two years) and I was reminded of one of my favorite examples of unexpectedly influencing someone. Sriram Krishnan wrote an article called " How...

Ever wonder how I produce nice textual allocation summaries like this one? This report shows allocations in dictread.log Total Allocations 136301 Objects 6694232 Bytes Top 10 Allocated Types Count Bytes Type 108040 5836392 System.String...

Q: When is a Private Byte not a Private Byte? A: When it isn't resident. The Private Bytes counter reports the commit charge of the process. That is to say, the amount of space that has been allocated in the swap file to hold the contents of the...

I'm happy to announce that I'm going to be at PDC on all the conference days and that I'm going to be doing performance clinics while I'm there. These will be 30 minute sessions where you can come and ask me pretty much anything you'd like or show me...

I'm often asked "What's new in Whidbey" and so I thought I'd put together this (very) brief list of some of the more important items that got attention during this product cycle. This is by no means exhaustive but it's a taste of some of the nice improvements...

Dave Fetterman has put together an excellent set of recommendations for string comparision practices . Now I am really pleased by this because: these recommendations are going to help you to avoid some nasty security weaknesses that might otherwise...

Joel Pobar has produced an excellent article on the costs of reflection that offers good insight into best practices.

Sometimes people ask me why my talks tend to teach the basics about performance and not Really Scary Performance Stuff (TM). My answer is actually pretty simple, I teach what I think most people need to hear and really most people need to be reminded...

My last entry was some generic advice about how to do a good performance investigation. I think actually it's too generic to be really useful -- in fact I think it fails my Peanut Butter Sandwich Test. Digression to discuss the Peanut Butter Sandwich...

I find that sometimes people have difficultly just getting started when doing a performance analysis – meaning they’re faced with a potentially big problem and don’t know where to begin. Over the years many people have come to me under those circumstances...