December 2008 Entries
I do performance measurements quite regularly which involves to call a piece of code several times to measure how long it did take. I am sure nearly everybody has done this already. But as a physicist I know that (nearly) every measurement has fundamental problems which never go away. Key to a successful measurement is that you exactly know what you are measuring and not what you think you measure. The easiest way to get out of this dilemma without too much knowledge is to simply ignore the fact ......
How can you use the word efficient memory usage and mention in the same headline .NET? We all know that C++ is much more efficient with regards to memory consumption. Yes I agree that if you really love your memory you should think twice if .NET is the right choice for you. There have been reasons why Windows Vista has not a single managed executable executed while starting up. Ok the Event Viewer is managed which explains why it is starting so slow. First of all you need to know what things cost. ......
I have installed Windows Vista Ultimate since some month now and I still wonder what system service I have missed to get a well behaved system. To troubleshoot heavy disk access I use Process Monitor from SysInternals. It is an invaluable tool to find out who did access what on the system. It can monitor every module load, process start, thread creation, registry or disk access and network activity you can imagine. If you are developing unmanaged code you can even view the call stacks who did access ......