SDP December 2011: Improving the Performance of .NET Applications

I apologize for the silence during the last two weeks—organizing the SDP and preparing three full-day sessions and two keynotes left no time to breathe :-)

On Monday I delivered a session called Improving the Performance of .NET Applications at the SELA Developer Practice. Here are some of the practical scenarios we covered:

• Measuring application memory usage and allocation sources
• Diagnosing memory leak sources with memory profilers
• Using sampling and instrumentation profilers to find CPU bottlenecks and methods with problematic cache access patterns
• Reading performance counter information as a lead into more intensive diagnostics

Additionally, we’ve had a couple of hours to talk about more “theoretical” things such as the memory layout of .NET reference types, boxing and its true implications, workstation and server GC flavors, and GC generations.

It’s been the second time I’m doing this session (the first was at the DevDays in June), and the room was packed again. I thought then, as I do now, that learning how to measure application performance is impossible without some practice time with the tools – so this time we created a unique format with 7 hours of frontal training followed by 2 hours of self-paced hands-on exercises in a computer classroom. I think this workshop format is the best way to experience performance measurement and optimization in a single-day setting.

If you participated in this day, thanks a lot for coming, for your constructive comments and for your interesting questions. If not – you can always take the full course, or else I’ll see you at the next SDP in May :-)

Other sessions delivered today included Windows Phone Mango (by Alex Golesh), HTML 5 (by Gil Fink), WCF Crash Course (by Erez Harari), and Windows Azure (by Manu Cohen-Yashar). Tomorrow Noam and I are up to talk about the new C++ standard and other C++ goodies—stay tuned!

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