Macintosh & Silverlight perf...

I met recently with two designers trying to figure out "what was Silverlight doing under the covers? did I accidentally turn on some feature?" 

My first thought is to reference my post on how to minimize CPU usage. We have to learn how to conserve not only energy but CPU cycles (yes, even if you don't see a difference on your dev box)

My second thought, as I stared at the designers' laptop: have you checked out Apple's Shark tool made for the Mac? Pretty quick and easy to learn -- you can navigate through the entire callstack of Silverlight.

For the Silverlight mac developers out there, check out Shark:

• Using Shark: https://developer.apple.com/tools/performance/optimizingwithsystemtrace.html
• Link to download "Computer Hardware Understanding Development" (CHUD) tools: https://developer.apple.com/tools/download/

My general usage:

1. Launch my silverlight application in a browser
2. Direct Shark towards the browser's process
3. Click on Start (it should have a 30sec timeout by default)

When you see the callstack, anything with agcore is from Silverlight. 

Why is it named agcore? From Wikipedia: "Ag from the Latin Argentum is the chemical symbol for silver "

Enjoy, tell me about your experiences. Any successes? Any questions about what is showing up in the trace?

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 02, 2007
  PingBack from http://www.artofbam.com/wordpress/?p=4680

• Anonymous
  October 02, 2007
  I met recently with two designers trying to figure out "what was Silverlight doing under the covers

• Anonymous
  October 08, 2008
  For those of you who are a) building graphics-intensive applications or b) trying to debug your performance,