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Checklist: Interop Performance

Source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnpag/html/ScaleNetCheck05.asp
J.D. Meier, Srinath Vasireddy, Ashish Babbar, Rico Mariani, and Alex Mackman

Design Considerations

* Design chunky interfaces to avoid round trips.
* Reduce round trips with a facade.
* Implement IDisposable if you hold unmanaged resources across client calls.
* Reduce or avoid the use of late binding and reflection.

Marshaling

* Explicitly name the target method you call.
* Use blittable types where possible.
* Avoid Unicode to ANSI conversions where possible.
* Use IntPtr for manual marshaling.
* Use in and out to avoid unnecessary marshaling.
* Avoid aggressive pinning of short-lived objects.

Marshal.ReleaseCOMObject

* Consider calling ReleaseComObject in server applications.
* Do not force garbage collections with GC.Collect.

Code Access Security (CAS)

* Consider using SuppressUnmanagedCode for performance-critical, trusted scenarios.
* Consider using TLBIMP /unsafe for performance-critical, trusted scenarios.

Threading

* Reduce or avoid cross-apartment calls.
* Use ASPCOMPAT when you call single-threaded apartment (STA) objects from ASP.NET.
* Use MTAThread when you call free-threaded objects.
* Avoid thread switches by using Neutral apartment COM components.

Monitoring Interop Performance

* Use performance counters for P/Invoke and COM interop.
* Use CLR Spy to identify interop problems.

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