Silverlight TV 57: Performance Tuning Your Apps (Channel 9)

Silverlight TV 57: Performance Tuning Your Apps

Posted: Jan 13, 2011 at 9:00 AM

By: John Papa

(3)

54,986 Views

8 Comments

Video format

Option selected may change based on video formats available and browser capability.

Auto

Use our suggested format for this video.

Smooth Streaming

Adaptive bitrate streaming - little buffering but lower video quality at times of low bandwidth. Silverlight 5 required

Progressive

Traditional buffered video format. Silverlight 5 required

HTML5

For browsers that support H.264 MP4 or WebM video playback such as:
IE9+, Firefox 4+, Chrome 5+, or Safari 4+.

Flash

For browsers that have the Adobe Flash Player plugin installed.

Application performance is a hot topic, and for good reason. User Experience is hugely important, but if your app is slow then everything degrades, including UX. In this episode, John talks to the Silverlight team's Mike Cook who shares several techniques that help tune Silverlight applications. With performance, it's all about knowing what tools to use and how to use them. Mike covers these topics and focuses on:

CPU Profiling in Visual Studio 2010
Memory Analysis
o VMMap - 30,000 ft view of app memory
o WinDbg + SOS Debug Extension - Managed memory analysis
o XPerf Heap Instrumentation - Native memory analysis

You can find all of the links for the tools and information on how to use them in the relevant links listed below.

Relevant links:

Follow the Discussion

Oops, something didn't work.

Try again?

Getting "follow" information

Stop following these comments

Start following these comments

Removing your "follow"

Setting up your "follow"

Subscribe to this comments

Yes you can. For out-of-browser applications instead of profiling iexplore.exe you'll need to profile sllauncher.exe (mine is located at "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Silverlight\sllauncher.exe"). Instead of passing the .html page as a command line argument, you'll pass the out-of-browser token for the application (this is the name of the folder your .exe lives in under "C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Silverlight\OutOfBrowser") followed by the "/debug" switch. So when you're finished it'll end up looking something like so:

What is the path to the full executable?
- C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Silverlight\sllauncher.exe

Command line arguements:
- 3800347859.testapp /debug

Follow
Oops, something didn't work.

Try again?

Sign In to be begin to follow these comments

What does this mean?
Following an item on Channel 9 allows you to watch for new content and comments that you are interested in. You need to be signed in to Channel 9 to use this feature.

Getting "follow" information

Stop following these comments

Start following these comments

What does this mean?
Following an item on Channel 9 allows you to watch for new content and comments that you are interested in and view them all on your notifications page.

Removing your "follow"

Setting up your "follow"

Did you know you can
sign up for email notifications?
- Subscribe to this comments

Kurt

Jan 13, 2011 at 10:01 AM

Mike Cook is great. I want to see more of this guy!
martinmine I see you're a coder, I'm pretty much a coder myself

Jan 13, 2011 at 11:22 AM

What about out-of-browser applications? Are we able to profile those using Visual Studio 2010?
MikeCook Silverlight Performance
Jan 13, 2011 at 11:52 AM
Yes you can. For out-of-browser applications instead of profiling iexplore.exe you'll need to profile sllauncher.exe (mine is located at "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Silverlight\sllauncher.exe"). Instead of passing the .html page as a command line argument, you'll pass the out-of-browser token for the application (this is the name of the folder your .exe lives in under "C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Silverlight\OutOfBrowser") followed by the "/debug" switch. So when you're finished it'll end up looking something like so:
- What is the path to the full executable?
  - C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Silverlight\sllauncher.exe
- Command line arguements:
  - 3800347859.testapp /debug
Nereus

Jan 13, 2011 at 6:15 PM

great
OlivierGauthier

Jan 18, 2011 at 12:25 PM

I used Mike's technique to adress a memory leak in the heap. All my Outstanding memory allocations, when I drill down the Stack, end up to Wow64SystemServiceEx.
I use a WCF service in my application, is that what this points to?
akcajunqueen

Jan 18, 2011 at 9:39 PM

i want to dowload Silverlight but got lose along the instructions.
MikeCook Silverlight Performance

Jan 19, 2011 at 1:40 PM

@OlivierGauthier: If you post a question with more detailed information about the stack in the Silverlight Performance Forum we can try to help you out.
Shimoakki Dream and Pursue

Jan 19, 2011 at 2:00 PM

Hey Mike, if that's your laptop this is a shoutout to a fellow SC II player! I noticed that icon down in your task bar haha! Excellent tutorial and set of demos. Thanks.

Remove this comment

Remove this thread

Comments Closed

Comments have been closed since this content was published more than 30 days ago, but if you'd like to continue the conversation, please create a new thread in our Forums,
or Contact Us and let us know.