Ryan Cromwell » Performance

1 reason to stick with Windows Virtual PC

cromwellryan — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 01:27:28 +0000

For those who aren’t aware, Windows 7 (which I absolutely love) has the ability to mount and run native Virtual PC VHD’s. This is huge, but it isn’t exactly a cake walk. That is until now! DevHawk has provided a PowerShell script to make life beautiful. Never complain about your Virtual machine performance again… get (all but disk) native performance.

Outlook 2007 Huge Performance Improvement

cromwellryan — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:32:44 +0000

If you use Outlook 2007 go get this hotfix (download here) now. It’s crazy faster after this update.

Hurry!

PerformanceHelper.cs Update: Perfmon, Console, and Debug Output options

cromwellryan — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 00:36:59 +0000

I’ve updated my PerformanceHelper class that I’ll throw around certain code blocks to help trend or monitor performance. Before it was merely a PerformanceCounter wrapper with a few metrics, but now you can specify Console, Debug and/or Perfmon. You do this by using an XOR ( ’|’ ) in a new Constructor. Here’s an example which outputs to Debug.WriteLine and PerfMon:

for (int index = 0; index < 10; index++)
{
    using (new PerformanceHelper("ConsoleSample",
        "Perfmon Sample", OutputOptions.Debug | OutputOptions.Perfmon))
    {
        Thread.Sleep(500);
    }
}

The method that does the Output to Console and Debug is marked as [Conditional("DEBUG")], because you really should have a better strategy for performance monitoring in production and you don’t want that hit for each block that you wrapped.

Note to Vista Developers: You will have problems creating custom performance counters at runtime based on registry access. To support this in a client based app, you will need to specify an application manifest and mark it with the following:

For more information on application manifests, read this.

PerformanceHelper for easy PerformanceCounter integration

cromwellryan — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 14:26:11 +0000

In the Speedy Rewards team here we use custom PerformanceCounters quite extensively to monitor and trend our host systems. You may not know, but our rewards program implements real-time host integration for transactions that are Id’ed as a SpeedyRewards member such that systems like the in-store kiosk, www.SpeedyRewards.com, and any other store you may soon visit can accurately reflect balance updates immediately. With 1600+ stores doing this and a sub-1 second response time, we need to keep a close eye on things.

Today I was trying to do some preliminary performance profiling on our new WCF based messaging infrastructure. To make my life a little easier, I put together a PerformanceHelper class that I actually modeling off the Tracer class found in the Enterprise Library 1.1. To use it, you wrap a section of code you wish to monitor performance for with the following:

using(new PerformanceHelper(CATEGORY, "") )
{
    //...
}

This will provide you with a RateOfCountsPerSecond32 counter and an AverageTimer32 counter called “Operations/sec\” and “Average Time/Operation\” respectively. You can download the PerformanceHelper class here and a sample project here.

Feel free to use and abuse it, but be aware that this has not fully tested and may well contain bugs. I provide NO warranty or guarantees, so don’t come to me when your server blue-screens from a corrupt registry (not that I’ve ever done that). Use at your own peril.