Slides for a talk on Performance

 I am giving a .NET Performance talk for the users group at the Royal Bank of Canada, and I am posting the slides for the talk here for future reference.  (see power point document attached to this entry below). 

 Anyone who has heard me speak will see recognise the themes:  Good perf does not just happen, you have to plan, and to plan you have to measure.  I touch very briefly on some ways of measuring (Stopwatch, MeasureIt, XPerf)

As with all talks, the goal is not so much to teach something, but rather to MOTIVATE you to learn more.   Thus I want it to be very easy to follow up on the topics I so briefly touched upon.   Thus I have pulled the bibliography out of the deck and placed it here so you can quickly research more.

• Articles
  • Vance Morrison's MSDN articles
  • The Fallacy of Premature Optimization (Randall Hyde, ACM.org)
  • MSDN Performance: Designing Distributed Applications
  • The Ten Rules of Performance
  • Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability
• Blogs
  • Vance Morrison's Weblog
  • Rico Mariani's Performance Tidbits
  • CLR and Framework Perf Blog
  • Xperf Blog
•  Tools
  • MeasureIt
  • Xperf performance analysis tool

I did not have time to more than just mention it, but I want to emphasize here that Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) and its viewer (XPERF), is the most useful general purpose tool for doing performance analysis on windows, period. It is well worth investing time in learning about it more. Currently it has some limitations associated with diagnosing managed code, however rest assured that we are addressing these issues.   

 An important take away here is that learning about XPERF is a great investment. It is THE tool that the entire Windows team uses for all of its performance diagnosis, and we are investing in it for the future too.    

RBC_Talk.pptx

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 22, 2009
  Thanks for talking to us at RBC today Vance. Too bad we had to rush you through your talk though, everything you had to say was very interesting with regards to application performance. I'm not in a developer capacity at RBC at the moment (I'm only a summer student) but I'm involved with some performance testing on a .NET application and it's clearly evident that they didn't plan for performance from the beginning. I will definitely take what you presented with me when I develop my software projects in the future. Thanks again.