Managed Code Performance

I never quite know how to start something like this without sounding a bit goofy.  “Hi there” seems odd, seeings as I have no real idea who I'm talking to yet.  Ah well.

My name is Bill Wert.  I'm a Software Test Engineer on the CLR Performance team.  I started this blog in hopes that I can fill what I see as a niche.  People like Rico talk about what kind of design patterns can lead to bad performance.  The message at the end of the day is that until you measure your own scenario, you won't really know.  What I'm hoping to provide through this blog are tips on measuring your performance.  There are a number of gotchas that you may or may not be aware of.  So, over the next N weeks as time allows, I'm going to cover topics in this neighborhood:

• How to time code
• What metrics should you be tracking, and how often
• Useful tools for measuring performance
• Suggestions?

I'm sure there are things that you might be curious about which I haven't listed here - please let me know in the comments of this post.

Also - Thanks to Scott!

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 08, 2004
  Hey Scott. I would love to hear more about properly measuring code performance. I can't wait to hear what you have to say. ** Subscribed **
• Anonymous
  March 08, 2004
  Hi Jason. It's Bill, actually :)
  
  Look for something tommrow. Is there anything specific you're curious about?
  
  -Bill
  
• Anonymous
  March 08, 2004
  Fantastic! I have wished for a while there was someone on the CLR team who could advise us on:
  
  What are the range of metric values I should expect to see for a given scenario. For example, how many gen1 collections per minute is OK for a heavily loaded web app? This sort of stuff is inherently subjectective - but subjectivity comes from experience and looking at this sort of stuff day in, day out is not my job. I hope some of your experience in this area will be put down in words.