June 25, 2007
An Exercise in Performance Tuning in C#.Net
Problem: Your application is slow. Horribly slow. And that just isn't acceptable.
I had a real world problem with an application that needs to process an input file, performing various calculations on pieces of data in each line. When complete the app has to recreate the input file with calculation results inserted. Goal: 3-4 minutes for a particular base line file size. Initial version ran in 2 hours. Clearly there's a problem here. So I started wracking my brain for everything I'd ever read or learned about performance, and more importantly did a lot of careful searching on the 'net.
Result: down to 5.5 minutes. Still not quite there, but to say "substantial improvement" is quite the understatement. I'll be posting a series of articles on the resources and methods used to achieve this huge jump.