.NET news » Performance

This article does not give an introduction to multithreading, processes, processors, etc. Nor does it gives the syntax details of threading functions. It only presents the practical approach to multi-threaded programming. If you do not know about multithreading, then read some articles on the web that show the syntax, how you write console applications, and how to use two threads simultaneously writing on the console. Learn about how one finishes before the other and things like that. Here, I am only concerned about the practical approach.

Recently a client made us question one of our fundamental assumptions about the.NET Framework and Web Services by asking, "Why should we use proxy class created by Visual Studio to connect to a web service?" In this particular project we were calling a web service to retrieve data, which was then sorted, formatted slightly and displayed in a web page. The client hypothesized that it would be more efficient to invoke the web service directly via the HttpWebRequest class, retrieve the XML output, populate an XmlDocument object, then use XSLT to output the result to HTML. Surely that would be faster than using Visual Studio's auto-generated proxy class, right?

Prior to this request, we had never considered rolling our own proxy class; we had always taken advantage of the proxy classes Visual Studio auto-generated for us. Could these auto-generated proxy classes be inefficient? Would retrieving and parsing the web service's XML directly be more efficient? The only way to know for sure was to test my client's hypothesis…

Parallel computing and concurrent programming are rapidly becoming mainstream topics for discussion in the corporate world. These are not new ideas; in fact they've been around for more than 30 years. However, like many long-running computer science concepts, they're only now becoming relevant to mainstream business developers due to changes in both hardware and in the overall computing environment.

If you have a multi-core computer, chances are your first CPU does all the work while the others spend most of their time twiddling their electronic thumbs. Learn to unlock the idle power of your underused CPUs to greatly improve the performance of your applications.

Find out how to avoid the kind of resource consumption that impedes your application's performance or even stops it from working altogether.

How to use the DynamicMethod and ILGenerator classes to create dynamic code at runtime that outperforms reflection

Your own extensible and configurable Thread Pool

The try/catch block is used to capture thrown exceptions and to allow an application to recover gracefully from the problems that caused them. This article has been created to determine if the try/catch block causes a substantial performance penalty.

This article has two aims. Firstly, there are a series of five exercises that detail the process of successfully multi-threading a sequential algorithm with timely progress display in the UI. It also provides an implementation of a thread local storage class which can help realise the performance promise of many-core machines.

In this article, we will look into JIT optimizations, with specific focus on inlining.