.NET news » Performance

Uncaught exceptions in your .NET applications can turn an otherwise high-performance application into a snail, especially those that are allowed to be "eaten" by subsequent code. Find out how to use very handy "First Chance" exception feature in the .NET debugger to root out nasty hidden exceptions.

Nearly every application needs to cache data. While you're probably familiar wth the caching functionality built into ASP.NET, the Enterprise Library Caching Block provides in-memory, file-based, or database caching storage for all your other .NET applications.

JIT compilation has its advantages, but it has its drawbacks, too. NGen may help to improve the performance of your applications. Surupa Biswas shows you why and when.

A C#, C++, Delphi, and Java trace framework and a trace viewer: Tail, outputDebugString, event log, and with Log4J, Log4Net, and Microsoft Enterprise Instrumentation Framework (EIF) support. This comes with full support for Pocket PC development.

An article on a performance testing tool to test an application against its performance.

In the test case as given there's a great deal of repeated work extracting the length of the array and accessing the items. This is because of the unusual property that arrays have -- they implement IList for potetially more than one T even due to inheritance. In the interest of economy alone then it is worthwhile to consolidate the IList implementations into some kind of secret helper but this has some consequences.

Short results:

Test Case	Milliseconds
Test1: Array	54
Test2: List<>	8
Test3: ArrayWrapper	14
Test4: Array via foreach	9
Test5: List<> via foreach	11
Test6: Array via special	6
Test7: List<> via special	8

A short and sweet quiz with lots of juicy discussion possibilities:

public int Sum(IList<ushort> indices)
{
int result = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < indices.Count; i++)
result += indices[i];
return result;
}

Considering only the time it takes to do the Sum (i.e. assuming we had already set up the array/list) which gives better performance and why?

// #1
ushort[] tmp = new ushort[500000]; // this doesn't count
Sum(tmp);// this is what we are timing

OR

// #2
List<ushort> tmp = new List<ushort>(500000); // this doesn't count
for (int i = 0; i < 500000; i++)tmp.Add(0); // this doesn't count
Sum(tmp); // this is what we are timing

What say you gentle readers?

CLR Inside Out: Extending System.Diagnostics

Here Joachim H. Frцhlich and Reinhard Wolfinger show you how to get all the great functionality of the .NET Profiling API the easy way, with custom wrappers.

This article explores the services provided by Compute Cluster Server 2003 and the tools provided by Visual Studio 2005 that will help you develop High-Perfomance Computing applications.