xxiii
Introduction
is book has come to be because we felt there was no authoritative text that covered all three areas relevant to
.NET application performance:
Identifying performance metrics and then measuring application performance to verify •
whether it meets or exceeds these metrics.
Improving application performance in terms of memory management, networking, I/O, •
concurrency, and other areas.
Understanding CLR and .NET internals in sucient detail to design high-performance •
applications and x performance issues as they arise.
We believe that .NET developers cannot achieve systematically high-performance software solutions without
thoroughly understanding all three areas. For example, .NET memory management (facilitated by the CLR
garbage collector) is an extremely complex eld and the cause of signicant performance problems, including
memory leaks and long GC pause times. Without understanding how the CLR garbage collector operates,
high-performance memory management in .NET is left to nothing but chance. Similarly, choosing the proper
collection class from what the .NET Framework has to oer, or deciding to implement your own, requires
comprehensive familiarity with CPU caches, runtime complexity, and synchronization issues.
is book’s 11 chapters are designed to be read in succession, but you can jump back and forth between topics
and ll in the blanks when necessary. e chapters are organized into the following logical parts:
Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 deal with performance metrics and performance measurement. •
ey introduce the tools available to you to measure application performance.
Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 dive deep into CLR internals. ey focus on type internals •
and the implementation of CLR garbage collection—two crucial topics for improving
application performance where memory management is concerned.
Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, and Chapter 11 discuss specic areas of the •
.NET Framework and the CLR that oer performance optimization opportunities—using
collections correctly, parallelizing sequential code, optimizing I/O and networking
operations, using interoperability solutions eciently, and improving the performance of
Web applications.
Chapter 9 is a brief foray into complexity theory and algorithms. It was written to give you •
a taste of what algorithm optimization is about.
Chapter 10 is the dumping ground for miscellaneous topics that didn’t t elsewhere in the •
book, including startup time optimization, exceptions, and .NET Reection.
Some of these topics have prerequisites that will help you understand them better. roughout the course of the
book we assume substantial experience with the C# programming language and the .NET Framework, as well as
familiarity with fundamental concepts, including:
www.it-ebooks.info
