.NET Performance: Tales from the Field

Today I had the pleasure of presenting at the IDCC (Israeli Developers Community Conference). This unique conference was organized by the community, for the community and the sessions were selected by members of the community. I’m also proud to say that my company, Sela Group, has sponsored the conference.

Overall the day has been great with lots of interesting talks. My session, .NET Performance: Tales from the Field, was one of the only sessions I ever delivered that didn’t have any code at all. I’m not usually proud of not showing code, but I deliberately wanted to focus on tools, analysis and mitigation of as many performance case studies as I could manage in a 75-minute session.

We discussed seven case studies, six of which were real performance issues I worked on as head of the Performance Team at Sela, and one that I borrowed from Microsoft’s Rico Mariani:

• Modifying an authorization-search algorithm from using a top-down tree search to a bottom-up tree search
• Improving the cold startup performance of a mixed managed/native application
• Decreasing time in GC from 70% to approximately 3% by shortening the lifetime of temporary managed objects
• Fixing 250ms delays caused by GC suspension
• Marshaling data between byte arrays and managed structures using code generation
• Converting lock-based in-memory queues to lock-free queues
• Improving WCF serialization performance in .NET-to-.NET scenarios with complex object graphs

You can download the slides—no demo code—from here.

It’s been a great pleasure to see everyone who attended my session. It was recorded by Sela and the recording should be available online in the next few days on the IDCC website.

(The pictures in this post courtesy of Gadi Meir.)