.NET news » Performance

A framework for object serializiation/deserialization that is many times faster and yields compact output.

Nowadays, multi-core processing is a growing industry trend as single core processors rapidly reach the physical limits of possible complexity and speed. It's obvious that if such wonderful hardware exists, it should be supported in .NET, shouldn't it? To check this I looked for a well-known easy-parallelizable algorithm. The benchmark should have handled different .NET parallelizing techniques with memory and mathematical operations. In my opinion, the best algorithms that fit these requirements are QuickSort and Matrix multiplication.

Please take into account, that this article doesn't describe any algorithms' optimization techniques. Instead it shows, how to parallelize your C# code and compares the performance of different approaches.

How much faster will implementing "the generic bad algorithm" in SSE2 make it?

There are a lot of ways to improve performance in web applications. One of the simplest but most effective methods is to cache images on the client. In this article I would like to show how we implemented image caching for our DotNetNuke website.

I work with performance-critical software that often requires some form of cache to function efficiently. However, there is also often a need to constrain memory usage, so I set out to create a high-performance cache with a maximum size.

This month Stephen Toub explains how to make the most of dual processors when running encryption and compression tasks.

A SortedList implementations using a cyclic algorithm and C# IDictionary tweaks

The Caching Application Block's provider mechanism lets you create a custom provider that stores cached data anywhere you want. It was this that made me wonder if it was possible to cache data within or through a web service, which would allow the provider to cache its data almost anywhere—remotely or locally—without having to write specific code that is directly integrated within Enterprise Library.

The principle is simple enough. Instead of having the backing store provider within the Caching Application Block interact directly with the backing store (the usual approach, as implemented in the Isolated Storage provider and Database provider), the backing store provider simply packages up the data and sends it to a web service..

The Task Parallel Library (TPL) is designed to make it much easier to write managed code that can automatically use multiple processors. Using the library, you can conveniently express potential parallelism in existing sequential code, where the exposed parallel tasks will be run concurrently on all available processors. Usually this results in significant speedups.

TPL is being created as a collaborative effort by Microsoft Research, the Microsoft Common Language Runtime (CLR) team, and the Parallel Computing Platform team. TPL is a major component of the Parallel FX library, the next generation of concurrency support for the Microsoft .NET Framework...

With the release of Windows Vista® and the upcoming release of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft has enriched the Windows platform with so much new technology for developers of managed applications that it's easy to overlook advancements that the native Windows developer can benefit from. The thread pool component that has been part of the platform since the release of Windows 2000, for example, has undergone a complete rearchitecture. The new implementation brings with it a new thread pool API that should make it much easier for developers to write correct code. The legacy APIs are still supported so that legacy applications can continue to run, but, as you'll see, there are many benefits to be gained from moving to the new APIs...