C# Performance

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Tips & Tricks

Every developer should use a Profiler

There are some great .NET profilers out there.

Our favourites are:

- dotTrace profiler from the Jet Brains team

- Red Gate profiler

The higher level abstraction you’re using, theslower it will often be.

LINQ is great for expressing something quicklythat might otherwise take a bunch of lines ofcode.

But in performance focused parts of your codebase you can be giving away too much. Especiallysince it’s so easy to chain together so manyoperations.

Don’t under estimate Release builds vs. Debug builds

I’d been doing all my tests inside Visual Studio.Release builds have optimisations enabled.

I did a release build, called the methods I wastesting from a console app.

Time for some of the micro-optimisations that the.NET JIT compiler to shine!

Get something running well enough in debug modeand you’re about to get some “free” performancein a release build.

- Good times!

Look at the bigger picture

There are some fantastic algorithms out there.

A developer doing research before coding is aboutas likely as a developer doing proper analysisbefore writing code.

We LOVE code and always want to dive right intothe IDE.

I recommend reading resources like CleverAlgorithms:

http://www.cleveralgorithms.com/

It was certainly an eye opener to me on some ofthe more advanced algorithms out there.

Lets assume we have an array of arrays.

Effectively it’s a table, 3000×3000 in size. Wewant to count how slots have a value greater thanzero in them......

Memory locality matters

Which of these is faster?

Answer? The first one.

How much so? In my tests I got about an 8xperformance improvement on this loop!

Notice the difference? It’s the order that we’rewalking this array of arrays ([i][n] vs. [n][i]).Memory locality does indeed matter in .NET eventhough we’re well abstracted from managingmemory ourselves.

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