Channel 9 - Entries tagged with performance

.NET 4.5: Vance Morrison - Performance and Memory Diagnostics

Charles — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 16:57:10 GMT

Performance Architect Vance Morrison spends his time isolating and solving performance issues in the .NET framework and Visual Studio, and Vance and team have recently been busy tuning the performance and memory usage characteristics of .NET's upcoming release.

Here, we learn about some of the performance and memory usage issues that Vance has focused on for .NET 4.5, which will ship in the next version of Visual Studio. If you're a .NET developer, you'll be pleased to learn about the great work that's going on in this area in addition to the development of a new memory diagnostics tool...

Tune in.

BUILD Expo: Intel on Windows Server 8

Son VoBa (SVoBa) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:34:05 GMT

At the BUILD Conference, Intel Corporation Mark Swearingen discusses Intel's engineering collaboration with Microsoft on Windows Server 8, highlighting the areas around power management, performance, virtualization, storage and networking.

Tweaking T4 Templates to Improve Script Performance

G. Andrew Duthie — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:49:09 GMT

In this DevNugget, a follow-up to part 1, Make Script Performance Automatic with Custom Templates in Visual Studio 2010, Developer Evangelist G. Andrew Duthie shows you how you can customize the T4 templates used for creating new Views in an MVC3 application, to move script references to the bottom of the page. Why the bottom? As explained in the previous installment, because some browsers won't load any additional content while they're busy downloading a script, so if you're loading a large script file from an external site, or if that external site isn't available, your entire page may be blocked from loading. Yikes!

Along the way, you'll learn a bit about quickly creating an MVC3 application using Entity Framework Code First and MVC3 Scaffolding.

For those of you who like your tutorials in step-by-step format, check out the accompanying blog post at devhammer.net.

Some additional resources:

Visual Studio Toolbox: Reporting Performance Issues with PerfWatson

Robert Green — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 18:38:18 GMT

Have you ever run into a scenario where a long running task causes the Visual Studio UI thread to hang or become unresponsive? The PerfWatson extension logs these issues and automatically and anonymously reports back to Microsoft.

In this episode, we are joined by Cameron McColl, who explains why the PerfWatson extension was created and how you can install it. He also shows us some collected data and explains how it's used to drive performance improvements and make Visual Studio faster.

Make Script Performance Automatic with Custom Templates in Visual Studio 2010 - Part 1

G. Andrew Duthie — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 20:42:37 GMT

In this DevNugget, Developer Evangelist G. Andrew Duthie shows you how you can create your own custom templates for your web application, with script references moved to the bottom of the page. Why the bottom? Because some browsers won't load any additional content while they're busy downloading a script, so if you're loading a large script file from an external site, or if that external site isn't available, your entire page may be blocked from loading. Yikes!

For those of you who like your tutorials in step-by-step format, check out the accompanying blog post at devhammer.net.

Some additional resources:

what are Virtual log files - VLF in SQL server - video

Harsh_Chawla, Gaurav Srivastava — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:04:15 GMT

In this presentation you will learn :

1. Very basics of transaction logs internal structure i.e. VLFs.

2. Best practices for the log files.

3. Impacts of too many VLFs

Presented By:- Sakthivel Chidambaram

Implicit conversions and their implications on the SQL query execution

Harsh_Chawla, Gaurav Srivastava — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:35:12 GMT

In this presentation , you will learn about what are implicit conversions. What can be their implications in the SQL query executions.

Presented by:

Rahul Digwasia

Silverlight TV 57: Performance Tuning Your Apps

John Papa — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 17:00:00 GMT

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:

Inside Windows Phone #03: Optimizing Windows Phone Silverlight Applications

Jaime Rodriguez — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:51:00 GMT

Shane Guillet, the test lead for Silverlight on Windows Phone, joins Jaime Rodriguez for some hands-on tips and tricks and advice for those wanting to create fast Silverlight applications for Windows Phone.

Relevant links:
Shane's performance paper and samples
Silverlight performance team's blog
Oren Nachman blog

(Oren is a Silverlight performance tester on Shane's team and Shane might be sharing tips via that blog until we convince him to get his own.)

MSDN Webcast: Acumem software improves performance and power efficiency for Windows applications in just minutes

Wenming Ye — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 04:16:00 GMT

New tools are needed to assist Windows developers to take full advantage of the potential of multicore processors. Acumem’s performance debugger, ThreadSpotter is one such tool and is now available for Windows and Visual Studio.

Unlike a traditional profiler, which only identifies the sections of the application where most of the execution time is spent, a performance debugger automatically monitors and analyzes the behavior of an application, identifies the location and nature of performance bugs and suggests how they can be removed. Acumem’s performance debugger automatically analyzes how well your application makes use of the target multicore architecture, pinpoints performance problems and suggests necessary fixes. Bugs related to both thread interaction and non-optimal use of the memory hierarchy are identified at the click of a button.

During this webcast we will introduce the new performance debugger technology from Acumem that recently has been made available for Windows programmers, both as a stand-alone version and as a Visual Studio plug-in. We will use Acumem ThreadSpotter to demonstrate the analysis and fix of popular open-source applications in minutes. Performance improvements or energy savings of up to 30 times are demonstrated.

Presenter: Erik Hagersten, CTO of Acumem AB

IE 9 Performance Pipeline Overview

Charles — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:18:00 GMT

Get your hands on the IE9 developer platform preview!

IE Performance PM Jason Weber and Performance Dev Lead Venkat Kudallur take us through the updated and improved performance pipeline in IE (hardware accelerated graphics rendering, new JavaScript engine (employing a dual execution pipeline), improved downloader, etc). We also get to see some really cool demos!

CPU Sampling using Visual Studio 2010 Performance Analyzer Tool

Wriju Ghosh — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:58:00 GMT

Here I have discussed about the Performance Analyzer Tools’s sampling mechanism. You can check the performance of your application and compare between the two states.

Sample : http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/VSTS2010B1PeopleTrax

Stay tuned,

Wriju (http://blogs.msdn.com/wriju)

First code profiler for Silverlight

martinesmann — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 09:40:00 GMT

Join ISV Developer Evangelist Henrik Westergaard Hansen from Microsoft Denmark as he sits down with lead developer Richard Flamsholt to talk about EQATEC's latest offering: the first publicly available code profiler for Silverlight applications.

The company's EQATEC Profiler was released back in April 2008 to much appreciation among developers because it was - and still is - the world's only code profiler for .NET Compact Framework applications, and also quite easy to use. Now, EQATEC has leveraged that technology in the newly released version 3.1 of their profiler so it works with Silverlight applications, too, as well as full .NET and .NETCF apps.

Join Henrik and Richard for two actual demonstrations and a talk about how this code profiler works internally and what the secret is. An early version of the SilverFace application Scott Guthrie showcased at PDC09 is briefly profiled, as is EQATEC's own large Silverlight client-app for their EQATEC Analytics service. In that client a real performance bottleneck is identified and fixed so data in a particular view loads 2.25 times faster.

Download EQATEC Profiler at http://www.eqatec.com/tools/profiler and follow @eqatec on Twitter.

The Access Show: Client performance improvements against SharePoint lists

Tina — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:46:00 GMT

Today’s guest is DJ Cole, architect and primary developer of SharePoint connectivity performance improvements on the Access development team. DJ dropped by to talk about how Access 2010 connects to SharePoint, and to discuss the work necessary for improving client-side performance.

As with most performance work, beauty is in the eye of the user. When users work against a server on the other side of the world, performance makes a difference. Data, after all, only travels as fast as the speed of light. Our goal for Access 2010 was to make the connections to SharePoint lists nearly as fast as local tables. Additionally, we had to ensure requests didn’t swamp the server, bottleneck throughout the network, or cause the client machine’s CPU or RAM to thrash. We found that caching data in local tables, combined with conservative usage of resources on the server, network and local machine, provided the best user experience.

This Access 2010 performance improvement builds upon the Access 2007 architecture. Read more…

For additional information about the latest release, check out the Access 2010 Intro series on the Access team blog.

Faster Solid State Drives for Windows 7 Arrive

Larry Larsen — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 14:37:00 GMT

While Windows 7 supports Solid State Drives (SSD), there is a speed increasing feature that hasn't been leveraged yet. The technology is called a TRIM operation and it makes the drive faster with more complete delete operations and reduces wear.

Corsair Memory and OCZTechnology Group have released firmware updates to enable TRIM on some of their SSD's. Once installed, Windows 7 also disables ReadyBoost, Superfetch, and Disk Defrag, which are better used for speed increases on platter hard drives. We'll try to catch up with the two companies when we get to CES next week.

(Windows7News.com)

Windows HPCS 2008R2 Beta1: Performance Analysis and Diagnostics

Wenming Ye — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:39:00 GMT

Performance is always of paramount importance in HPC -- clusters can never be fast enough or have too much throughput. Windows HPC Server 2008R2 beta1 provides several powerful monitoring and profiling tools, giving admins the information they need to squeeze every bit of performance from their setups. From exhaustive ping pong test data and graphical heat maps to advanced tools such as XPERF and Event Tracing for Windows (ETW), HPC Server provides the information needed to make the most of parallel computing.

Rico Mariani: Inside Visual Studio Beta 2 - Performance and Reliability

Charles — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:48:00 GMT

I caught up with the great Rico Mariani, Visual Studio's Chief Software Architect, after his keynote at a VS partner conference held on the Microsoft campus. He tells us all about the improvements in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. Rico and team have taken the performance and reliability of Visual Studio to new levels in this release. Gone are the days of synchronous assembly and COM component reference look-ups (woo hoo!!!). Gone are the long start up times. Gone are roughly 90% of the performance bottlenecks that slowed down the development experience inside the VS2010 Beta 1 IDE. The Visual Studio development team worked their tails off to improve perf and reliability across the board. Tune in to learn about what they did and what they will do prior to RTM. Truly excellent engineering goes on in building 42. Well done, team!

Rico also discusses his final blog post in his VS history series, a 5,000 word up to the minute historical piece. After watching Tina's great VS documentary series, Rico decided to add his own perspective in a 10 part blog post blitz. Great stuff!

Enjoy.

Windows 7 PCs Offer Better Battery Life

Sarah Perez — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 06:22:00 GMT

A a recent press demo, Microsoft principal program manager Ruston Panabaker showed how Windows 7 computers have better battery life than their older Vista counterparts. In general, the new OS will provide anywhere from 10 to 20 percent better battery improvement when watching a DVD. For the demonstration, two identical laptops playing the same DVD were compared, one running Windows Vista and the other running Windows 7. The Windows 7 PC lasted 20% longer.

These improvements have been made possible through joint efforts from both Microsoft and Intel who have worked together to bring better performance to the Windows 7 OS in areas like virtualization, power management, and performance. Also demonstrated was a PC that was able to boot up in 11 seconds. Although it’s important to remember that boot speed in the real world will be determined by a number of factors including hardware, installed applications, and system settings.

David Fields and Bill Karagounis: Inside Windows 7 - Reliability, Performance and PerfTrack

Charles — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:31:00 GMT

PerfTrack is the feedback and monitoring system inside of Windows 7 that performs measurements on, well, all things related to the overall performance of the OS, especially as it relates to system responsiveness to user actions. So, when you click on something (an icon, a folder name, etc...), how long does it take for the user to receive an expected reaction from the system? What are the bottlenecks that lead to a poor experience (user-observable latency) when using some feature in Windows? Is the root problem in the design of the feature itself or with the underlying OS? Enter PerfTrack.

Here, Development Manager David Fields and Group Program Manager Bill Karagounis share their wisdom and experience in the world of OS performance analysis. David and Bill explain how PerfTrack works and we digress into an interesting conversation about power management.

PerfTrack is an example of a technology that provides incredibly important real-world information to Windows engineers that can be used to solve performance problems in Windows.

Enjoy!

Michael Fortin: Windows 7 Efficiency

Charles — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:42:00 GMT

The Windows 7 project involved very efficient software engineering planning and execution. It is no surprise that an equivalent level of efficiency exists throughout the OS (efficiency in how the OS deals with faults, threads, memory management, power management, process management, window management, graphics, audio, local search, diagnostics, and on and on - truly excellent, and efficient, engineering).

Michael Fortin is a Distinguished Engineer in the Windows Core Operating System Division. His team builds the technologies that help make Windows 7 reliable, stable and performant, which are core ingredients in any highly efficient general purpose operating system. You'll hear us talk about Windows 7 as a very efficient general purpose operating system quite a bit over the coming months. In fact, if I had to sum up Windows 7 in one word it would be Efficient.

Michael's team also builds the troubleshooting and diagnostics systems in Windows, including the internal mechanisms that construct fault data packages and sends them to cloud-based components which receive data from millions of clients running Windows 7. Michael's team is a global team - engineers are located in multiple places around the world including a stellar team of engineers located in Beijing, China (you'll meet them in the future right here on C9).

You may remember Michael from his last interview on Channel 9 that covered his work on Vista's SuperFetch and ReadyBoost technologies. Yep, these great technologies are alive and well in Windows 7 and have evolved to meet the needs of the evolving system and help add to the overall efficiency of Windows. (There, I wrote "efficiency" again...)

Over the past year or so, Michael's team has received, analyzed and acted upon a very large amount of data sent from Windows 7 Beta and RC running on a variety of PCs with a variety of hardware and software configurations in place. This data was used to construct new system features, like the Fault Tolerant Heap, and to engineer updates to existing mechanisms to make them more robust or performant or reliable or stable... You will meet some of his team here on C9 in the future and we will dig into many of the mechanisms Michael touched on in this conversation (Fault Tolerant Heap, Troubleshooting and Diagnostics, etc).

Here, Michael and I chat about the work his team has done, the engineering philosophy that has driven efficiency into Windows at all levels (from the kernel to the shell), the knowledge his team has gained about how Windows is used in the wild, what the most common problems have been and the solutions that are based on this important telemetry data. So, for all of you out there who chose to send fault data from your PC to Microsoft - THANK YOU. You truly have helped, in a fundamental way, to make Windows 7 the most efficient general purpose operating system from Microsoft to date. Yeah. True story.

Enjoy.

ACE's Performance Development Lifecycle for IT (PDL-IT)

Jossie — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:29:00 GMT

Microsoft ACE team has been involved in performance testing and tuning of web applications within Microsoft and externally for several years now. Microsoft's Information Security - ACE Performance has been using a methodology which they have now formalized as PDL-IT (Performance Development Lifecycle for IT) which consists of a proactive approach for application performance within the SDLC.

Irfan Chaudhry, Director of InfoSec's ACE Team, explains this methodology after being part of ACE for 8 years and having started as a Performance Analyst himself.

If you want to learn more about PDL-IT, you can read more on the ACE Team blog in a series of posts.

This Week: Martin Woodward, MVP Summit, Web Perf, Show Off, and a VSTS Pep Talk

Dan Fernandez — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 18:45:00 GMT

This week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian are joined by MVP Martin Woodward to discuss this week's news, including:

- Martin talks about the MVP Summit and how hewon the Team System MVP of the year. The prize, a pimp belt
- Phil Haack: ASP.NET MVC RC 2
- Tutorial: How to enable Gzip compression on IIS 6.0 to get ~70% smaller file size
- Viktar Karpach - Getting an "A" Grade with ASP.NET using YSlow and Firebug
- Erik Meijer and Charles Torre interview Anders Hejlsberg on the future of C#
- Michael Kennedy - ubbuzz.com A custom Twitter watcher for .NET developers
- Jamie and Long start the Channel 9 Task Force for bugs and suggestions
- 1 week left for Show Off Contest
- Vincent Rithner - Sobees, A free WPF Social Desktop Aggregator, Beta now available
- Rob Relyea - XAML State of the Union
- Caliburn Application Framework for WPF and Silverlight(via Alvin Ashcraft)
- Tess Ferrandez - 5-part series on building a Silverlight Game
- Live FrameIt SDK - Picasa and Photobucket integration
- Martin's pick of the week: Send a VSTS Pep Talk to your teammates
- Brian's pick of the week: Scott Hanselman's analysis of Quake Live, it isn't a Web game
- Dan's pick of the week: Brian Peek's tip on how to force a 64-bit exe that uses a 32-bit dependencies to load the 32-bit CLR.

Application Performance Reviews: ACE Team

Jossie — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:20:00 GMT

The Assessment Consulting & Engineering (ACE) team, part of the Microsoft Information Security group, assesses the performance of Microsoft applications. Principal Performance Manager, K.M. Lee, discusses his team's methodology after many years of experience on this area which keeps evolving as technology changes. K.M. also describes how they have taken their knowledge into the field to Microsoft customers and partners as well as how they are taking the next step by creating performance review tools.

For more information on the tool K.M. mentions, neXpert see: webcast, download

Inside IE 8 RC1 with Dean Hachamovitch and Jason Upton

Charles — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:34:00 GMT

IE team General Manager Dean Hachamovitch and IE Test Manager Jason Upton sit down with me to discuss the significance of today's IE 8 RC1 release. What did the IE team learn from the Beta 2 release? What changes did they make in response to customer feedback? Will the IE team still take and act upon fedback now that RC1 is here? With so many browsers on the market today how does IE remain competitive and maintain marketshare? No conversation on IE can be complete, of course, without talking about the web platform and standards so we go there....

Of course, you can expect this discussion to continue at MIX09 (and you'll be a key participant in the conversation with Dean and team in Vegas).

See the IE Blog for more detailed info on what's in IE8 RC1.

Tune in. This is a great conversation with two key leaders behind and in front of IE (Dean is the all up team leader (as you know by now given how many times you've seen him on C9 and at various conferences) and Jason is responsible for overall product quality (he owns the stuff you seldom see or hear about - software testing)).

Symantec Launches New Gamer-Friendly Antivirus

Sarah Perez — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 15:42:00 GMT

If there's anything gamers hate is having their PC interrupt them or slow them down when they're in the middle of a game. Now, gamers can keep their computer protected from the latest threats without having to worry about their AV getting in the way, says Symantec. The company's new Norton Antivirus 2009 Gaming Edition offers a "gamer mode" that promises not to bug you during gameplay or impact your system performance in any way.

According the company's web site, gamer mode offers the following: No alerts, no notifications, no interruptions, Optional settings to suspend updates, behavioral scanning and intrusion prevention, Gamer mode is automatically enabled when the PC is in full-screen mode. Gamer mode can be manually enabled with a click on the system tray icon. In addition, the Norton AV Gaming edition promises to be both fast and light.

Fast:
- Rapid Pulse Updates every 5 to 15 minutes.
- Installs in less than a minute.
- Adds less than 1 second to boot time.
Light:
- Uses less than 6MB memory even without the Gamer Mode performance boost.
- Needs less than 50MB hard disk space on installation.
- Runs only 2 processes at a time.
- Performance graphs display CPU and memory usage and how little Norton is using.

Although it's typical to think "yeah right" when you hear a company making claims such as these, it's worth noting that in Walt Mossberg's Wall Street Journal review of the new 2009 edition of Norton AV, he wrote that Symantec had "largely succeeded" in addressing the typical issues with AV software (slowdowns, bloat, annoyances, etc). "It isn't perfect," he writes, "but it is the fastest, simplest and least obtrusive security suite I have ever used." Remember, gamers, don't let this happen to you!