EXCLUSIVES
Writing High Performance .NET Code
Since most day to day operations are moving online (Core banking, Reservations, Shopping), software performance has become vital to their success. So many times visits to a web site takes long time to load, resulting in frustration and the migration to a different site (similar business). For businesses this can be fatal as they lose customers. Web sites often slow or even go down when traffic increases. Performance/stress testing of your application can help avoid such downtime. There are tools that tell you performance of your application is bad but not necessarily why. But if you have information knowing what to look for, what is good and what is bad, will put your application in better shape later.
With Microsoft® .NET Framework, developers can now build complete business solutions quickly with more functionality and robustness with its rich and easy to use features and functionality. But with this comes increased opportunity for architects and developers to design and build poor, non scalable solutions because architecting and designing these solutions are not really very straight forward. This paper talks about the core performance related issues that one should be aware of in .NET. This paper also talks about some common mistakes which one should avoid and many tips for writing high performance .NET code.
This paper will discuss:
- .NET Framework components and CLR execution Model
- Threading support in .NET and tips for avoiding common threading mistakes
- Automatic Memory management – Writing GC friendly code
- Briefly talks about performance tools available for tuning .NET code
The .NET Framework provides a run-time environment called the CLR, which manages the execution of code and provides services that make the development process easier. CLR provides features such as automatic memory management (GC), exception handing, security, type safety, JIT (Just in time compiler for converting msil to native code) and more. CLR is implemented as a dll called “mscorwks.dll”. It also has support for Base Class Libraries (BCL) which sits on top of CLR, providing libraries for functionalities such as String, File I/o, and Networking, Collection classes, Data Access (ADO.NET) and XML processing. On top of BCL there are presentation layers (Web Forms and Windows forms), which provide UI functionality. Last, one finds the languages that Microsoft ® provides for .NET. Currently there are more than 15 different languages that are targeted for .NET framework.
Figure 1: .NET Framework Components and CLR execution Model
Each Language has a compiler which compiles and converts the code to msil (Microsoft® Intermediate Language). There are multiple optimizations that are built into each of these compilers which produce efficient IL code. Then CLR takes over and it has the JIT compiler convert this IL code into native code that CLR can execute. The JIT compiler also has many optimizations built in which can produce efficient native code for better performance. If the code is unmanaged, then we bypass most of this and can directly run unmanaged programs. Note that .NET provides additional features by which we can use pointers to access arrays etc through a feature called “unsafe” for better performance.
Figure 2: CLR Execution Model
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