Rico Mariani's Performance Tidbits

Implying no warranties and conferring no rights: "AS IS" since 1988

Forwarding address

You can find me posting here now: https://www.facebook.com/perftidbits

Date: 05/22/2017

Final Posting

My last day at Microsoft will be tomorrow, 3/24/2017. I really did want to get to some of the old...

Date: 03/23/2017

Discovered comments

I just discovered that there are all kinds of comments pending approval, some from several months...

Date: 02/03/2017

symbol filter redux

A while ago I provided this local symbol server proxy you could use to get just the symbols you...

Date: 02/03/2017

Supporting Women in Computer Science (Part 2)

Last night I wrote about my new scholarship (previous post) Today I have something to ask. I know my...

Date: 12/11/2015

Rico Mariani Women in Computer Science Scholarship

Just a few minutes ago I signed my part of the papers to create the Rico Mariani Women in Computer...

Date: 12/10/2015

The many types of asserts and their meaning, and dealing with assert bugs

A good way to get a quick rise out of me is to tell me how you’re going to just delete some...

Date: 10/10/2015

A brief excerpt from mail to my team today

"I couldn’t possibly list [...] all the crucial changes we made to make...

Date: 07/29/2015

If working on Microsoft Edge with me is something you could get excited about then read on

This link has the details....

Date: 07/23/2015

What you really need to know about regular expressions before using them

If you want to use regular expressions in production code the most important thing you must know...

Date: 07/20/2015

Shortest Proof of Elegance

About two months ago I had an extraordinary opportunity to talk to some Great People in the context...

Date: 06/07/2015

Holistic approaches to performance analysis

About 6 weeks ago I prepared a talk on some of my experiences addressing performance problems in the...

Date: 05/31/2015

"Linq to Memory": another old idea

One of my readers asked if I had any particular plans around memory density for Visual Studio to go...

Date: 01/02/2015

Low Level Considerations for VS of the Future (an old memo)

I wrote this a long time ago. It's very interesting to me how applicable this is today. And how it...

Date: 12/23/2014

Use Symbol Filtering to get symbols you care about from your server instead of getting the kitchen sink

One of the most annoying things about working with performance traces is that they include...

Date: 12/08/2014

Anybody want a peanut?

I wrote a message much like the below yesterday and I kept cracking up once I had started. And...

Date: 12/03/2014

Example of a transform for unit testing something tricky

There were some requests for an example of my unit testing strategy so made up this fragment and...

Date: 11/27/2014

How to make ANY code in ANY system unit-test-friendly

[I added this example in a later post] There are lots of pieces of code that are embedded in places...

Date: 11/20/2014

A Personal History of Microcomputing (Part 2)

[All the parts in this history] I could spend a long time writing about programming the PET and its...

Date: 11/19/2014

Using telemetry to reveal, prevent, and act on real problems in the wild

I hesitate to bring this up but there’s no sense hiding it. For the last year I’ve been...

Date: 11/09/2014

Career advice part 2

I wrote some career advice a few weeks ago now, those few points are largely distilled from talks...

Date: 11/09/2014

Non-Properties of floating point numbers

I recently received a customer question that boiled down to the oft-encountered binary floating...

Date: 10/15/2014

Career advice for anyone who cares to listen :)

At the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing there are many attendees offering and looking...

Date: 10/09/2014

Performance Quiz #14: Memory Locality etc. Bonus Round!

[Note: I accidently pasted an x64 result in place of an x86 result. As it happens the point I was...

Date: 09/29/2014

Performance Quiz #14: Memory Locality, x64 vs. x86, Alignment, and Density

[ Note: Mystery of the shuffling is solved, the rand() method I was using returns only numbers...

Date: 09/28/2014

Wow I love git-tf!

I switched to git about 3 years ago because the portability was so great. Moving work between...

Date: 09/26/2014

You don't have to write it (all) first...

It seems like I get pretty much the same questions all the time. A common one is, "Rico can you tell...

Date: 09/24/2014

To preload or not to preload...

Q: My application starts slowly, I want to preload it to avoid that problem. Should I be worried? A:...

Date: 08/29/2014

On adopting high end perf tools to study micro-architectural phenomena

Huge words of caution: you can bury yourself in this kind of stuff forever and for my money it is...

Date: 08/29/2014

Some nice performance features in Visual Studio 11

This sort of solution managment brings welcome relief.

Date: 03/21/2012

Coding in Marble (Part 2)

I thought I'd follow up on my last technical post with a few extra details about the Marble pattern,...

Date: 02/20/2012

Measuring IE Performance

The Building Windows 8 blog has an interesting article on how we measure IE perf. Recommended...

Date: 02/17/2012

Coding in Marble

I wish I could remember where I first read it because perhaps it deserves attribution. But many...

Date: 02/02/2012

Ngen or not? The rules haven't changed very much since 2004

I still get questions that amount to "should I ngen my <something>" from time to time and the...

Date: 01/31/2012

Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability

This series can still be found here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff649152.aspx While...

Date: 01/11/2012

Performance and Design Guidelines for Data Access Layers

Many problems you will face are actually the building data access layer, sometimes thinly disguised,...

Date: 01/10/2012

Going to Internet Explorer

Many of you have commented that I've been kind of quiet lately. This was largely a reflection of my...

Date: 11/12/2011

Measure!

I know I haven't posted for a while; I'm hoping that will change soon. However in the mean time my...

Date: 09/20/2011

Less Loosely Coupled Than Meets The Eye

I don’t know that it is possible to write anything like a unitary software system in a way...

Date: 09/27/2010

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