In the process of digging deeper into WPT I did find many new ways to explore my system. The Windows Performance Toolkit for Windows 8 is NOT only for Windows 8 but it does run on Windows Vista and later. This toolkit is the the Hubble Space Telescope of performance engineering. It gives you call stacks far far away in the kernel and back across all ......

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With the new Windows Performance Toolkit you can now identify bottlenecks in your system which did not show up in any profiler. Lets e.g. query for some system properties via WMI. static void Main(string[] args) { var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); string[] queries = new string[] { "Win32_Processor", "Win32_Printer", "Win32_ComputerSystem", "Win32_VideoController", ......

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A colleague of mine asked me how he can find out why his laptop does consume 30% CPU in the SYSTEM process after it did wake up from hibernate. That is easy I replied: Open Process Explorer select the SYSTEM process, double click it, select the thread tab, sort by CPU and double click on the first thread which does consume so much CPU to get the call ......

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SpeedTrace is a relatively unknown profiler made a company called Ipcas. A single professional license does cost 449€+VAT. For the test I did use SpeedTrace 4.5 which is currently Beta. Although it is cheaper than dotTrace it has by far the most options to influence how profiling does work. First you need to create a tracing project which does configure ......

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JustTrace is made by Telerik which is mainly known for its collection of UI controls. The current version (2012.3.1127.0) does include a performance and memory profiler which does cost 614€ and is currently with a special offer for 306€ on sale. It does include one year of free upgrades. The uneven € numbers are calculated from the 799€ and 399$ discount ......

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The YourKit (v7.0.5) profiler is interesting in terms of price (79€ single place license, 409€ + 1 year support and upgrades) and feature set. You do get a performance and memory profiler in one package for which you normally need also to pay extra from the other vendors. As an interesting side note the profiler UI is written in Java because they do ......

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Jetbrains which is famous for the Resharper tool has also a profiler in its portfolio. I downloaded dotTrace 5.2 Professional (569€+VAT) to check how far I can profile the startup of VS2012. The most interesting startup option is “.NET Process”. With that you can profile the next started .NET process which is very useful if you want to profile an application ......

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I just downloaded ANTS Profiler 7.4 to check how fast it is and how deep I can analyze the startup of Visual Studio 2012. The Pro version which is useful does cost 445€ which is ok. To measure a complex system I decided to simply profile VS2012 (Update 1) on my older Intel 6600 2,4GHz with 3 GB RAM and a 32 bit Windows 7. Ants Profiler is really easy ......

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Performance optimization in bigger systems is hard because the measured numbers can vary greatly depending on the measurement method of your choice. To measure execution timing of specific methods in your application you usually use Time Measurement Method Potential Pitfalls Stopwatch Most accurate method on recent processors. Internally it uses the ......

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Recently I had to do some performance work which included reading a lot of code. It is fascinating with what ideas people come up to solve a problem. Especially when there is no problem. When you look at other peoples code you will not be able to tell if it is well performing or not by reading it. You need to execute it with some sort of tracing or ......

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Recently I have found an interesting issue with Thread.Interrupt during application shutdown. Some application was crashing once a week and we had not really a clue what was the issue. Since it happened not very often it was left as is until we have got some memory dumps during the crash. A memory dump usually means WindDbg which I really like to use ......

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I have written already some time ago how big a .NET object is. John Skeet as also made a very detailed post about object sizes in .NET. I wanted to know if we can deduce the object size not by experiments (measuring) but by looking at the Rotor source code. There is indeed a simple definition in the object headers how big a .NET object minimally can ......

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What is it? WMemoryProfiler is a managed profiling Api to aid integration testing. This free library can get managed heap statistics and memory usage for your own process (remember testing) and other processes as well. The best thing is that it does work from .NET 2.0 up to .NET 4.5 in x86 and x64. To make it more interesting it can attach to any running ......

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Delegates in .NET are a very handy addition to the language. With the introduction of LINQ they did become mainstream and everyone is using them or is at least finding them cool. But what the CLR is really doing to them under the covers remains largely unexplored. This is ok as long as you never get any memory dumps from the field with angry customers ......

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Good things are hard to kill. One of the most useful predefined compiler macros in C/C++ were __FILE__ and __LINE__ which do expand to the compilation units file name and line number where this value is encountered by the compiler. After 4.5 versions of .NET we are on par with C/C++ again. It is of course not a simple compiler expandable macro it is ......

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