Performance Profiling .NET Applications Using the Visual Studio Profiler
When I consult with development teams, at some point performance always rears its ugly head. When I code review something I often find it overly complex with lots of caching, “clever” code etc. and when I ask why the code is this complex the answer is usually for performance, E.g. “we need to cache the results as that’s an expensive operation”.
At this point I usually ask if they have any evidence to show how expensive the operation is, all too often the answer is “no”. Once again another developer is the victim of premature optimisation.
Now don’t get me wrong, optimising...
Activating AHCI mode after installing Windows on IDE mode
I recently just rebuilt my home PC and installed Winodws 7 on it. It was a nice fast, smooth install and generally went without a hitch.
That is, without a hitch until I discovered I'd installed Windows whilst the motherboard's SATA controller was in IDE mode and not AHCI mode. Why is this important? Well without AHCI you don't get nice things like power saving, native command queuing etc and that impacts the power consumption, speed and noise of your drives.
Of course that does rely on having a drive that supports those features, since like most newish drives mine do, I...