Links to MSDN articles I have written on designing for performance

  • Article

I just happen to notice that I don't have any links from my blog to some recient MSDN articles I wrote on performance.   I want to quickly correct his with this posting.

There is actually a very nice summary page that MSDN created that gathers together all the articles I have written over time.  The link is here (a web search of MSDN Vance Morrison will also turn it up).

The two articles I want to call your attention to however are these

CLR Inside Out: Measure Early and Often for Performance, Part 1 CLR Inside Out: Measure Early and Often for Performance, Part 2 

These articles are about how most perf problems start very early in the design, and that there is no substitute for knowing how much things cost when doing your design.

There is a nice companion tool that I wrote callled 'MeasureIt' which you get download (free), that allows you to

  • Get a bunch of useful benchmarks on how much various .NET operations cost
  • Measure other stuff that you happen to be interested in easily (eg how fast is that collection class you are using?)

In fact, I intend I just recently used MeasureIt to measure how expensive the various levels of the CPU cache hierarchy are.   (that is how much does a fetch from L1 cost?  How much if you miss the L1 Cache but hit the L2 cache?  How much more expensive is it when you miss both L1 and L2 and have to go to main memory?).   If there is interest I can write a quick blog about that.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 24, 2008
    My latest in a series of the weekly, or more often, summary of interesting links I come across related to Visual Studio. Scott Guthrie posted the latest installment of links for ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF and Silverlight . Vance Morrison posted links

  • Anonymous
    October 30, 2008
    <quote> In fact, I intend I just recently used MeasureIt to measure how expensive the various levels of the CPU cache hierarchy are.   (that is how much does a fetch from L1 cost?  How much if you miss the L1 Cache but hit the L2 cache?  How much more expensive is it when you miss both L1 and L2 and have to go to main memory?).   If there is interest I can write a quick blog about that. </quote> Hi, can you do that, write a blog on how to measure L1, L2 misses?  That would in fact be most interesting.  I didn't even know this was possible, or is this type of measurement only inferred from test data? -Thanks for your useful posts