July 2006 - Posts

Rico's thought for today
28 July 06 10:00 AM | ricom | 2 Comments   

I've said this before but I like it so much I thought I'd post it for posterity :) "Never use the advice of some loudmouth perf expert like me when you could do a nice solid measurement instead." Maybe I'll get it as a tattoo :) Read More...

Filed under: performance, ramblings

A nice little article on the fallacy of premature optimization
26 July 06 08:32 PM | ricom | 5 Comments   

Randall Hyde writes this very interesting article where he expounds on some notions I've often discussed in my talks. I'd definately say that our thoughts are one on the subject. My favorite bit is this little line portion: 'Note, however, that [Sir Tony] Read More...

Filed under: performance

Performance Signatures: A Qualitative Approach to Dependency Guidance
26 July 06 05:30 PM | ricom | 4 Comments   

I've been working on an idea here in my "spare" time for quite some time now -- basically in response to the fact that there is so much .NET Framework to cover and so little in the way of pervasive performance information about it. Time and again I'm Read More...

Filed under: performance

Throughput and Latency Considerations: Errata
24 July 06 09:37 PM | ricom | 2 Comments   

Well hats off to Ian Griffiths who pointed out that I had screwed up my math in my previous posting . When I went back to double check I found that I had made two fatal mistakes. Now I went back and used a better technique which I present below but -- Read More...

Filed under: performance

Throughput and Latency Considerations
21 July 06 12:08 PM | ricom | 8 Comments   

You know a funny thing happened when I joined the CLR team a few years ago. After working in MSN 7 years and coming back to the developer division, they decided that they wanted me to work on performance on the desktop. I thought for sure they were going Read More...

Filed under: performance

Glass Houses
19 July 06 03:46 PM | ricom | 0 Comments   

In his article Glass houses are great places to throw stones Raymond writes in part: Whenever I write an article explaining that programs should avoid doing X, I can confidently rely on a comment saying, " Well, Microsoft Product Q does this !" as if Read More...

Filed under: ramblings

Performance Quiz #10 -- Thread local storage -- Solution
18 July 06 04:25 PM | ricom | 6 Comments   

I actually posted quiz #10 quite a while ago but a comment with the correct solution came in so quickly that I wasn't very motivated to post a followup. There are excellent links in the comments (thank you readers!) But now I'll have to make the quizzes Read More...

Filed under: performance, quiz

System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch -- always remeber to use Reset
18 July 06 03:18 PM | ricom | 12 Comments   

Wrong System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch s = new System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch(); s.Start(); for (i = 0; i < count; i++) Test1(); s.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Test1: {0}", s.ElapsedMilliseconds); s.Start(); for (i = 0; i < count; i++) Test2(); s.Stop(); Read More...

Filed under: performance

Should you move to a 64 bit platform?
18 July 06 01:10 PM | ricom | 0 Comments   

Josh Williams wrote a nice summary of the big performance issues when considering x64. It's very succinct but it hits the main hightlights, especially worth noticing is the effect cache size reduction due to pointer inflation competing against the general Read More...

Filed under: performance

Posting suggestions for the future
17 July 06 03:34 PM | ricom | 14 Comments   

Several people in my department went to Teched and they came back with some general impressions of what kinds of performance problems our customers were encountering broadly. Of course they also came back with impressions in other areas but those are Read More...

Cost of array bounds checking -- one experiment
12 July 06 12:12 PM | ricom | 11 Comments   

Sometimes people ask me what the overhead of array range checking is. A while ago I did a quickish experiment to measure the cost of the bounds checking introduced by the JIT in a typical application. This is just one part of the managed safety net but Read More...

Filed under: performance