Checklist: Architecture and Design Review for Performance and Scalability
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Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability
J.D. Meier, Srinath Vasireddy, Ashish Babbar, and Alex Mackman
Microsoft Corporation
May 2004
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Use distributed architectures appropriately. Do not introduce distribution unnecessarily.
Carefully select appropriate distributed communication mechanisms.
Locate components that interact frequently within the same boundary or as close to each other as possible.
Take infrastructure restrictions into account in your design.
Consider network bandwidth restrictions.
Identify resource restrictions.
Ensure your design does not prevent you from scaling up.
Ensure your design does not prevent you from scaling out and it uses logical layers, does not unwittingly introduce affinity, and supports load balancing.
Coupling and Cohesion
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Ensure your design is loosely coupled.
Exhibit appropriate degrees of cohesion in your design and group together logically related entities, such as classes and methods.
Restrict use of late binding and only use late binding where it is necessary and appropriate.
Communication
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Interfaces do not enforce chatty communication.
Ensure your application only makes remote calls where necessary. Impact is minimized by client-side validation, client-side caching, and batching of work.
Optimize remote data exchange.
Choose appropriate secure communication mechanisms.
Use message queues to decouple component parts of your system.
Mitigate the impact of long-running calls by using message queues, "fire-and forget" approaches, and asynchronous method calls.
Do not use processes where application domains are more appropriate.
Concurrency
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In your application do not create threads on a per-request basis, and use the common language runtime (CLR) thread pool instead.
Only types that need to be thread-safe are made thread-safe.
Carefully consider lock granularity..
Ensure your application acquires shared resources and locks late and releases them early to reduce contention.
Choose appropriate synchronization primitives.
Choose an appropriate transaction isolation level.
Ensure your application uses asynchronous execution for I/O bound tasks and not for CPU bound tasks.
Resource Management
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Ensure your design supports and makes effective use of pooling.
Ensure your application acquires resources late and releases them early.
Caching
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Use caching for data that is expensive to retrieve, compute, and render.
Cache appropriate data such as relatively static Web pages, specific items of output data, stored procedure parameters, and query results.
Do not use caching for data that is too volatile.
Select an appropriate cache location.
Select an appropriate cache expiration policy.
State Management
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Your design favors stateless components. Or, you considered the negative impact on scalability if you decided to use stateful components.
If you use Microsoft® .NET Framework remoting and need to support load balancing, you use single call server-activated objects (SAO).
If you use Web services, you also use a message-based stateless programming model.
If you use Enterprise Services, also use stateless components to facilitate object pooling.
Objects that you want to store in state stores support serialization.
Consider the performance impact of view state.
Use statistics relating to the number of concurrent sessions and average session data per user to help choose an appropriate session state store.
Data Structures and Algorithms
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Ensure your design uses appropriate data structures.
Use custom collections only where absolutely necessary.
Extend the IEnumerable interface for your custom collections.
Data Access
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Pass data across the layers by using the most appropriate data format. Carefully consider the performance implications.
Use stored procedures with the Parameters collection for data access.
Only process the data that is required.
Where appropriate, provide data paging solutions for large result sets.
Use Enterprise Services declarative transactions for transactions that span multiple resource managers or where you need to flow transaction context across components.
If you manipulate binary large objects (BLOBs), use appropriate chunking techniques, and do not repeatedly move the same BLOB.
Consolidate repeated data access code into helper classes.
Exception Handling
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Do not use exceptions to control regular application flow.
Use well-defined exception handling boundaries.
Structured exception handling is the preferred error handling mechanism. Do not rely on error codes.
Only catch exceptions for a specific reason and when it is required.
Class Design Considerations
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Classes own the data that they act upon.
Do not use explicit interfaces unnecessarily. Use explicit interfaces for versioning and for polymorphism where you have common functionality across multiple classes.
Classes do not contain virtual methods when they are not needed.
Prefer overloaded methods to methods that take variable parameters.
Retired Content
This content is outdated and is no longer being maintained. It is provided as a courtesy for individuals who are still using these technologies. This page may contain URLs that were valid when originally published, but now link to sites or pages that no longer exist.
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