Make Mostly Read, Seldom-Written Lists Much More Efficient

 Posted on Mar 15, 2013  |  1703 words

One of the many things that I do at work is run a full-blown Search Engine which I also developed from scratch. This Search Engine feeds all product related information to our websites. A search index consists of a pre-computed collection of products, their properties, a list of words that are correctly spelled, and some pre-computed faceted/guided navigation. A search index, until this week, took up approximately 10.7 gigs of memory. [Read More]
dotnet  csharp  memory  performance  programming 

A Better MIME Mapping Stealer!

 Posted on Feb 12, 2013  |  181 words

In the interest of self-improvement and sharing knowledge, I felt that I should share an update to my last post. I discovered a slightly better way to create the GetMimeMapping delegate/method via reflection that involves less casting and overhead, and is more Object Oriented in a sense. It allows the signature of the reflected method to be Func<string, string> instead of MethodInfo. Code below, note the use of Delegate.CreateDelegate(Type, MethodInfo): [Read More]
dotnet  csharp  performance  programming  reflection 

Determine MIME Type from File Name

 Posted on Feb 11, 2013  |  654 words

I recently had a need, in an ASP.NET MVC3 application, to read raw HTML, CSS, JS, and image files from disk and return them to the user… A sort of “pass-through” if you will. Normally I’d have simply routed to a custom HTTP handler per file type or just allowed MVC3 to map existing files to supply its own .NET HTTP handlers and do all of this work for me, but in this case I needed the mapped “directory” to switch behind the scenes based on Session settings… So I ultimately had to feed these files through a Controller and Action Method to gain access to the Session. [Read More]
dotnet  csharp  performance  programming  reflection 

Published by Red Gate

 Posted on Jan 18, 2013  |  88 words

As of today I’ve been published in an e-Book offered for free by Red Gate! It is called 50 Ways to Avoid, Find and Fix ASP.NET Performance Issues and contains many useful performance tips which have been contributed by various members of the .NET community. Many tips are ASP.NET MVC specific which is also a plus. My tip is #3 and has to do with debugging Microsoft symbols. Get a free copy here – it has already taught me a few things I had never thought to consider! [Read More]
dotnet  performance  programming  published 

But it Didn't Happen in DEV or QA!

 Posted on Dec 2, 2012  |  1451 words

Most of us have been there: you’ve written a fantastic application that performs perfectly in your Development and/or QA environments, but in Production something goes wrong. Your application spins out of control, utilizing 100% of your CPU. Maybe it simply stops responding as if it were deadlocked. Or maybe it simply crashes randomly. What now? Logic tells you that you have a problem in the code somewhere that is only encountered in a Production-like environment… and if you could JUST get into the Production box, install Visual Studio (or at least the Remote Debugger), and debug the application, you’d be able to solve the problem. [Read More]
dotnet  debugging  performance  profiling  programming  windbg 

Static vs Instance string.Equals Benchmark

 Posted on Oct 24, 2012  |  184 words

A friend of mine commented on my last post asking about how much faster the static string.Equals method is than the instance string.Equals method. To satiate both of our curiosities, I have created this benchmarking application: static void Main(string[] args) { var stopwatch = new Stopwatch(); string a = "hello"; string b = "hi"; stopwatch.Start(); for (int i = 0; i < 10000000; i++) { a.Equals(b); } stopwatch.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Instance string.Equals over 10,000,000 iterations: " + stopwatch. [Read More]
dotnet  analysis  csharp  performance  programming 

Static vs Instance string.Equals

 Posted on Oct 22, 2012  |  196 words

As you may or may not know, static methods are usually faster than instance methods. This alone should be a good enough reason to use the static string.Equals method in .NET, but if that doesn’t do it for you, allow me to present a simple example. string a = "hello"; string b = "hi"; bool result = a.Equals(b); What is the expected result of these lines? A boolean value of false, of course. [Read More]
dotnet  analysis  csharp  performance  programming 

TPL and Error Handling & Continuation Tasks

 Posted on Aug 12, 2012  |  261 words

Two of my colleagues (one from work and one from a user group) kindly pointed out to me that in my last post I omitted Continuation Tasks as a means of Error Handling for the TPL. As such, I will expand upon my last post with an example of handling errors via a Continuation Task. Continuing where we left off last, the following code will utilize a Task Continuation to handle errors within Tasks. [Read More]
dotnet  async  csharp  performance  programming  tasks  tpl 

TPL and Error Handling

 Posted on Aug 5, 2012  |  1019 words

As of .NET 4.0, the TPL or Task Parallel Library is king when it comes to parallelization. It allows for smooth, easy multi-threading for any application. There is a slight learning curve, however, and a major part of this is understanding how Exceptions bubble-up while using the TPL. Let’s partake in a simple example. This code will create and run a task that throws an Exception, and then attempt to catch it: [Read More]
dotnet  async  csharp  performance  programming  tasks  tpl