Profiling Your Applications and Using Performance Counters

Abstract

In the previous chapter, you examined some of things you can do in your code to improve performance. In this chapter, you’ll continue along the same theme, but the focus in this chapter will be on the facilities that are available to assist in monitoring the performance of a managed application—in other words, identifying what particular factors may be preventing an application from performing well so that you know which parts of the code to concentrate on when you’re trying to improve its performance. Along the way, I’ll cover some of the tools that are available for profiling and the underlying APIs. You’ll also acquire some necessary background information, including in particular the principles behind how Windows manages memory.