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  • Screencast several application windows at once in Microsoft Windows

    - by Birt
    I have several (20+) applications running on a Microsoft Windows PC. What I would like is a solution that allows me to broadcast the window of each application in a webpage, in readonly mode (there's no need for the users to interact with it). This should work even if the application is in the background, seeing that there's no way to fit all of them on the screen. I performed very extensive searching, from simple screencasting apps such as Camtasia, CamStudio or VHScrCap to things like VNC (haven't found any server able to broadcast multiple windows at once, much less background windows) and even application virtualization, but in the end I haven't found anything that fits my needs. Most solutions that allow capturing a window instead of the whole desktop will not let you capture multiple windows but only a single window and on top of that they don't even work when the window is in the background.

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  • The Best Application Launchers and Docks for Organizing Your Desktop

    - by Lori Kaufman
    Is your desktop so cluttered you can’t find anything? Is your Start menu so long you have to scroll to see what programs are there? If so, you probably need an application launcher to organize your desktop and make your life easier. We’ve created a list of many useful application launchers in different forms. You can choose from dock programs, portable application launchers, Start menu and Taskbar replacements, and keyboard-oriented launchers. HTG Explains: What Is RSS and How Can I Benefit From Using It? HTG Explains: Why You Only Have to Wipe a Disk Once to Erase It HTG Explains: Learn How Websites Are Tracking You Online

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  • Application development : method to manage backgound process

    - by Simon Dubois
    I am developing an application with different behavior depending on the arguments : - "-config" starts a Gtk window to change options, start and close the daemon. - "-daemon" starts a background process that does something every X minutes. I already know how to use fork/system/exec etc... But I would like to know the main logic of such application to : - restart or refresh the daemon when configuration change. - keep only one instance of the daemon. I have red that killing the daemon to restart it is not a clean way to do. How other applications do ? (ubuntuone, weather forecast, rss feed working with notification area) Thanks for your help. PS : I don't want to create a system-wide daemon, just a user application with a background process.

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  • Effects of HTTP/TCP connection handshakes and server performance

    - by Blankman
    When running apache bench on the same server as the website like: ab -n 1000 -c 10 localhost:8080/ I am most probably not getting accurate results when compared to users hitting the server from various locations. I'm trying to understand how or rather why this will effect real world performance since a user in china will have different latency issues when compared to someone in the same state/country. Say my web server has a maximum thread limit of 100. Can someone explain in detail how end user latency can/will effect server performance. I'm assuming here that each request will be computed equally at say 10ms. What I'm not understand is how external factors can effect overal server performance, specifically internet connections (location, or even device like mobile) and http/tcp handshakes etc.

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  • Query performance counters from powershell

    - by Frane Borozan
    I am trying this script to query performance counters in different localized windows server versions. http://www.powershellmagazine.com/2013/07/19/querying-performance-counters-from-powershell/ Everything works as in the article, well partially :-) I am trying to access a counter ID 3906 Terminal Services Session and works well for English windows. However for example in French and German that counter doesn't exist under that ID. I think I figured to find the exact counter under ID 1548 in french and German, but that ID in English is something completely different. Anybody seen this behavior on the performance counters?

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  • RAID Array performance on an HP Proliant ML350 G5 Smart Array E200i

    - by Nate Pinchot
    We have a client who is complaining about performance of an application which utilizes an MS SQL database. They do not believe the performance issues are the fault of the application itself. The Smart Array E200i RAID controller has 128MB cache and we have the cache set to 75% read/25% write. The disk array set to enable write caching. Recently we ran a disk performance test using SQLIO based on this guide. We used a 10 GB file for the test found that the average sequential read rate was ~60 MB/sec (megabytes/sec) and the average random read rate was ~30 MB/sec. Are these numbers on par for what the server should be performing? Better than on par? Horrible? Amazing?

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  • How does NTFS compression affect performance?

    - by DragonLord
    I've heard that NTFS compression can reduce performance due to extra CPU usage, but I've read reports that it may actually increase performance because of reduced disk reads. How exactly does NTFS compression affect system performance? Notes: I'm running a laptop with a 5400 RPM hard drive, and many of the things I do on it are I/O bound. The processor is a AMD Phenom II with four cores running at 2.0 GHz. The system is defragmented regularly using UltraDefrag. The workload is mixed read-write, with reads occurring somewhat more often than writes. The files to be compressed include personal documents and selected programs, including several (less demanding) games and Visual Studio (which tends to be I/O bound more often than not).

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  • Enable: Asp.net connection pool monitoring with performance monitor

    - by BlackHawkDesign
    If this question is at the wrong forum, be free to tell me. I'm a c# developer, but I'm running in a system management issue here. Intro: Im suspecting that an asp.net application is having some issues with the connection pool and that the pool is flooding from time to time. So to make sure, I want to monitor the connection pool. After some searching I found this article : http://blog.idera.com/sql-server/performance-and-monitoring/ensure-proper-sql-server-connection-pooling-2/ Basicly it explains stuff about connection pools and how you can monitor the application pool with performance monitor. The problem: So I logged in to the asp.net server(The sql database is hosted on a different server) which hosts the website. Started performance monitor. But when I want to select 'Current # pooled and nonpooled connections', I have no instance to select. There fore I can't add it. Question How can I create/supply an instance so I can monitor the connection pool? Thanks in advance BHD

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  • Server Performance

    - by Burt
    We have a dedicated server that we use to stage websites (our test server). The performance of the server has become really bad and we regularly have to restart it. When performance is poor I have checked task manager for the processes and memory but everything looks OK. We use a content management system and it is always when using the admin section of this CMS that we notice the performance degrade which makes me think it may have something to do with DB calls the CMS is making. Does this sound viable? Any other sggestions of how I can go about testing this? Thanks in advance...

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  • Amazon EC2 performance vs desktop

    - by flashnik
    I'm wondering how to compare performance of EC2 instances with standard dedicated servers and desktop. I've found only comparance of defferent clouds. I need to find a solution to perform some computations which require CPU and memory (disc IO is not used). The choice is to use: EC2 (High-CPU) or Xeon 5620/5630 with DDR3 or Core i7-960/980 with DDR3 Can anybody help, how to compare their performance? I'm not speaking about reliability of alternatives, I want to understand pros and cons from the point of just performance.

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  • Flushing disk cache for performance benchmarks?

    - by Ido Hadanny
    I'm doing some performance benchmark on some heavy SQL script running on postgres 8.4 on a ubuntu box (natty). I'm experiencing some pretty un-stable performance, even though I'm supposed to be the only one running on the machine (the same script on the exact same data might run in 20m and then 40m for no specific reason). So, remembering my distant DBA training, I decided I should flush the postgres cache, using sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql restart, but it's still shaky! My question: maybe I'm missing some caches in my disk/os? I'm using a netapp appliance as my storage. Am I on the right track? Do I even want to make sure I get repeatable performance before I start tuning?

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  • SQL Server Performance & Latching

    - by Colin
    I have a SQL server 2000 instance which runs several concurrent select statements on a group of 4 or 5 tables. Often the performance of the server during these queries becomes extremely diminished. The querys can take up to 10x as long as other runs of the same query, and it gets to the point where simple operations like getting the table list in object explorer or running sp_who can take several minutes. I've done my best to identify the cause of these issues, and the only performance metric which I've found to be off base is Average Latch Wait time. I've read that over 1 second wait time is bad, and mine ranges anywhere from 20 to 75 seconds under heavy use. So my question is, what could be the issue? Shouldn't SQL be able to handle multiple selects on a single table without losing so much performance? Can anyone suggest somewhere to go from here to investigate this problem? Thanks for the help.

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  • Recommended website performance monitoring services? [closed]

    - by Dennis G.
    I'm looking for a good performance monitoring service for websites. I know about some of the available general monitoring services that check for uptime and notify you about unavailable services. But I'm specifically looking for a service with an emphasis on performance. I.e., I would like to see reports with detailed performance statistics from multiple locations world-wide, with a break-down on how long it took to fetch the different website resources, including third-party scripts such as Google Analytics and so on (the report should contain similar details such as the FireBug Net tab). Are there any such services and if so, which one is the best?

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  • spring.net application scope repository object on loadbalanced application

    - by Bert Vandamme
    Hi, We have an application running on a loadbalanced environment, let say webserver A and B. The loadbalancing is on the HTTP level, so the loadbalancer directs each user request to one of both webservers. The scope of the repositories in the application is managed by the spring.net container, and the application relies on data that can be cached by the repository (performance reasons). In this case we can never be sure that the cached data in the repositories on both webservers is the same. Is there mechanism in spring.net that can manage this kind problem? Or is there another common approach for this kind of thing? Any ideas? Thx, Bert

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  • Easy remote communication without WCF

    - by Ralf Westphal
    If you´ve read my previous posts about why I deem WCF more of a problem than a solution and how I think we should switch to asynchronous only communication in distributed application, you might be wondering, how this could be done in an easy way. Since a truely simple example to get started with WCF still is drawing quite some traffic to this blog, let me pick up on that and show you, how to accomplish the same but much easier with an async communication API. For simplicities sake let me put all...(read more)

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  • SQL Server Express and VS2010 Web Application .MDF file errors

    - by nannette
    I installed SQL Server 2008 as well as SQL Server Express 2008 on my new Windows 7 development environment, along with Visual Studio 2010. I could get SQL Server 2008 to work fine, but I could not use Express .MDF databases within sample web application projects without receiving the below error: Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server due to a failure in starting the process for the user instance. The connection will be closed. For instance, I was creating an ASP.NET Web Application. When...(read more)

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  • Problems building application for Ubuntu App Showdown

    - by Neil Munro
    I have managed to submit my source application to the Ubuntu build servers, however it's not building. This is the build output: https://launchpadlibrarian.net/109592385/buildlog_ubuntu-precise-i386.liberedit_12.07.20_FAILEDTOBUILD.txt.gz I know that there is a dependency on lxml for my application but I don't know how to correct that, but I can also see that it's failing to find my own python modules. I am not sure what is going on in it's entirety here, but I would greatly appreciate getting this to build so I can submit it to the Ubuntu App Showdown. Thanks, Neil

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  • Storing application preferences and data

    - by Rudi Strydom
    I am looking at creating some Ubuntu applications, but finding good resoures are hard. I am using the quickly toolkit, but would really like some more insight. How does one normally store application preferences and settings in Linux / Ubuntu. Is it as simple as creating a XML file and saving the information and then reading from said file on application bootstrap? If someone can point me in a direction it would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Write application indicator with no icon

    - by danjjl
    I wrote an application indicator that displays information about my monthly network consumption. I do not want it to have an icon next to the text I display. How do I write an application indicator without an icon? The code I use to initialize my indicator is: self.indicator = appindicator.Indicator.new("VooMeter", "network", appindicator.IndicatorCategory.SYSTEM_SERVICES) Reading the documentation I can not find the value to put instead of "network"

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  • Use IIS Application Initialization for keeping ASP.NET Apps alive

    - by Rick Strahl
    I've been working quite a bit with Windows Services in the recent months, and well, it turns out that Windows Services are quite a bear to debug, deploy, update and maintain. The process of getting services set up,  debugged and updated is a major chore that has to be extensively documented and or automated specifically. On most projects when a service is built, people end up scrambling for the right 'process' to use for administration. Web app deployment and maintenance on the other hand are common and well understood today, as we are constantly dealing with Web apps. There's plenty of infrastructure and tooling built into Web Tools like Visual Studio to facilitate the process. By comparison Windows Services or anything self-hosted for that matter seems convoluted.In fact, in a recent blog post I mentioned that on a recent project I'd been using self-hosting for SignalR inside of a Windows service, because the application is in fact a 'service' that also needs to send out lots of messages via SignalR. But the reality is that it could just as well be an IIS application with a service component that runs in the background. Either way you look at it, it's either a Windows Service with a built in Web Server, or an IIS application running a Service application, neither of which follows the standard Service or Web App template.Personally I much prefer Web applications. Running inside of IIS I get all the benefits of the IIS platform including service lifetime management (crash and restart), controlled shutdowns, the whole security infrastructure including easy certificate support, hot-swapping of code and the the ability to publish directly to IIS from within Visual Studio with ease.Because of these benefits we set out to move from the self hosted service into an ASP.NET Web app instead.The Missing Link for ASP.NET as a Service: Auto-LoadingI've had moments in the past where I wanted to run a 'service like' application in ASP.NET because when you think about it, it's so much easier to control a Web application remotely. Services are locked into start/stop operations, but if you host inside of a Web app you can write your own ticket and control it from anywhere. In fact nearly 10 years ago I built a background scheduling application that ran inside of ASP.NET and it worked great and it's still running doing its job today.The tricky part for running an app as a service inside of IIS then and now, is how to get IIS and ASP.NET launched so your 'service' stays alive even after an Application Pool reset. 7 years ago I faked it by using a web monitor (my own West Wind Web Monitor app) I was running anyway to monitor my various web sites for uptime, and having the monitor ping my 'service' every 20 seconds to effectively keep ASP.NET alive or fire it back up after a reload. I used a simple scheduler class that also includes some logic for 'self-reloading'. Hacky for sure, but it worked reliably.Luckily today it's much easier and more integrated to get IIS to launch ASP.NET as soon as an Application Pool is started by using the Application Initialization Module. The Application Initialization Module basically allows you to turn on Preloading on the Application Pool and the Site/IIS App, which essentially fires a request through the IIS pipeline as soon as the Application Pool has been launched. This means that effectively your ASP.NET app becomes active immediately, Application_Start is fired making sure your app stays up and running at all times. All the other features like Application Pool recycling and auto-shutdown after idle time still work, but IIS will then always immediately re-launch the application.Getting started with Application InitializationAs of IIS 8 Application Initialization is part of the IIS feature set. For IIS 7 and 7.5 there's a separate download available via Web Platform Installer. Using IIS 8 Application Initialization is an optional install component in Windows or the Windows Server Role Manager: This is an optional component so make sure you explicitly select it.IIS Configuration for Application InitializationInitialization needs to be applied on the Application Pool as well as the IIS Application level. As of IIS 8 these settings can be made through the IIS Administration console.Start with the Application Pool:Here you need to set both the Start Automatically which is always set, and the StartMode which should be set to AlwaysRunning. Both have to be set - the Start Automatically flag is set true by default and controls the starting of the application pool itself while Always Running flag is required in order to launch the application. Without the latter flag set the site settings have no effect.Now on the Site/Application level you can specify whether the site should pre load: Set the Preload Enabled flag to true.At this point ASP.NET apps should auto-load. This is all that's needed to pre-load the site if all you want is to get your site launched automatically.If you want a little more control over the load process you can add a few more settings to your web.config file that allow you to show a static page while the App is starting up. This can be useful if startup is really slow, so rather than displaying blank screen while the user is fiddling their thumbs you can display a static HTML page instead: <system.webServer> <applicationInitialization remapManagedRequestsTo="Startup.htm" skipManagedModules="true"> <add initializationPage="ping.ashx" /> </applicationInitialization> </system.webServer>This allows you to specify a page to execute in a dry run. IIS basically fakes request and pushes it directly into the IIS pipeline without hitting the network. You specify a page and IIS will fake a request to that page in this case ping.ashx which just returns a simple OK string - ie. a fast pipeline request. This request is run immediately after Application Pool restart, and while this request is running and your app is warming up, IIS can display an alternate static page - Startup.htm above. So instead of showing users an empty loading page when clicking a link on your site you can optionally show some sort of static status page that says, "we'll be right back".  I'm not sure if that's such a brilliant idea since this can be pretty disruptive in some cases. Personally I think I prefer letting people wait, but at least get the response they were supposed to get back rather than a random page. But it's there if you need it.Note that the web.config stuff is optional. If you don't provide it IIS hits the default site link (/) and even if there's no matching request at the end of that request it'll still fire the request through the IIS pipeline. Ideally though you want to make sure that an ASP.NET endpoint is hit either with your default page, or by specify the initializationPage to ensure ASP.NET actually gets hit since it's possible for IIS fire unmanaged requests only for static pages (depending how your pipeline is configured).What about AppDomain Restarts?In addition to full Worker Process recycles at the IIS level, ASP.NET also has to deal with AppDomain shutdowns which can occur for a variety of reasons:Files are updated in the BIN folderWeb Deploy to your siteweb.config is changedHard application crashThese operations don't cause the worker process to restart, but they do cause ASP.NET to unload the current AppDomain and start up a new one. Because the features above only apply to Application Pool restarts, AppDomain restarts could also cause your 'ASP.NET service' to stop processing in the background.In order to keep the app running on AppDomain recycles, you can resort to a simple ping in the Application_End event:protected void Application_End() { var client = new WebClient(); var url = App.AdminConfiguration.MonitorHostUrl + "ping.aspx"; client.DownloadString(url); Trace.WriteLine("Application Shut Down Ping: " + url); }which fires any ASP.NET url to the current site at the very end of the pipeline shutdown which in turn ensures that the site immediately starts back up.Manual Configuration in ApplicationHost.configThe above UI corresponds to the following ApplicationHost.config settings. If you're using IIS 7, there's no UI for these flags so you'll have to manually edit them.When you install the Application Initialization component into IIS it should auto-configure the module into ApplicationHost.config. Unfortunately for me, with Mr. Murphy in his best form for me, the module registration did not occur and I had to manually add it.<globalModules> <add name="ApplicationInitializationModule" image="%windir%\System32\inetsrv\warmup.dll" /> </globalModules>Most likely you won't need ever need to add this, but if things are not working it's worth to check if the module is actually registered.Next you need to configure the ApplicationPool and the Web site. The following are the two relevant entries in ApplicationHost.config.<system.applicationHost> <applicationPools> <add name="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" autoStart="true" startMode="AlwaysRunning" managedRuntimeVersion="v4.0" managedPipelineMode="Integrated"> <processModel identityType="LocalSystem" setProfileEnvironment="true" /> </add> </applicationPools> <sites> <site name="Default Web Site" id="1"> <application path="/MPress.Workflow.WebQueueMessageManager" applicationPool="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" preloadEnabled="true"> <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="C:\Clients\…" /> </application> </site> </sites> </system.applicationHost>On the Application Pool make sure to set the autoStart and startMode flags to true and AlwaysRunning respectively. On the site make sure to set the preloadEnabled flag to true.And that's all you should need. You can still set the web.config settings described above as well.ASP.NET as a Service?In the particular application I'm working on currently, we have a queue manager that runs as standalone service that polls a database queue and picks out jobs and processes them on several threads. The service can spin up any number of threads and keep these threads alive in the background while IIS is running doing its own thing. These threads are newly created threads, so they sit completely outside of the IIS thread pool. In order for this service to work all it needs is a long running reference that keeps it alive for the life time of the application.In this particular app there are two components that run in the background on their own threads: A scheduler that runs various scheduled tasks and handles things like picking up emails to send out outside of IIS's scope and the QueueManager. Here's what this looks like in global.asax:public class Global : System.Web.HttpApplication { private static ApplicationScheduler scheduler; private static ServiceLauncher launcher; protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Pings the service and ensures it stays alive scheduler = new ApplicationScheduler() { CheckFrequency = 600000 }; scheduler.Start(); launcher = new ServiceLauncher(); launcher.Start(); // register so shutdown is controlled HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(launcher); }}By keeping these objects around as static instances that are set only once on startup, they survive the lifetime of the application. The code in these classes is essentially unchanged from the Windows Service code except that I could remove the various overrides required for the Windows Service interface (OnStart,OnStop,OnResume etc.). Otherwise the behavior and operation is very similar.In this application ASP.NET serves two purposes: It acts as the host for SignalR and provides the administration interface which allows remote management of the 'service'. I can start and stop the service remotely by shutting down the ApplicationScheduler very easily. I can also very easily feed stats from the queue out directly via a couple of Web requests or (as we do now) through the SignalR service.Registering a Background Object with ASP.NETNotice also the use of the HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(). This function registers an object with ASP.NET to let it know that it's a background task that should be notified if the AppDomain shuts down. RegisterObject() requires an interface with a Stop() method that's fired and allows your code to respond to a shutdown request. Here's what the IRegisteredObject::Stop() method looks like on the launcher:public void Stop(bool immediate = false) { LogManager.Current.LogInfo("QueueManager Controller Stopped."); Controller.StopProcessing(); Controller.Dispose(); Thread.Sleep(1500); // give background threads some time HostingEnvironment.UnregisterObject(this); }Implementing IRegisterObject should help with reliability on AppDomain shutdowns. Thanks to Justin Van Patten for pointing this out to me on Twitter.RegisterObject() is not required but I would highly recommend implementing it on whatever object controls your background processing to all clean shutdowns when the AppDomain shuts down.Testing it outI'm still in the testing phase with this particular service to see if there are any side effects. But so far it doesn't look like it. With about 50 lines of code I was able to replace the Windows service startup to Web start up - everything else just worked as is. An honorable mention goes to SignalR 2.0's oWin hosting, because with the new oWin based hosting no code changes at all were required, merely a couple of configuration file settings and an assembly directive needed, to point at the SignalR startup class. Sweet!It also seems like SignalR is noticeably faster running inside of IIS compared to self-host. Startup feels faster because of the preload.Starting and Stopping the 'Service'Because the application is running as a Web Server, it's easy to have a Web interface for starting and stopping the services running inside of the service. For our queue manager the SignalR service and front monitoring app has a play and stop button for toggling the queue.If you want more administrative control and have it work more like a Windows Service you can also stop the application pool explicitly from the command line which would be equivalent to stopping and restarting a service.To start and stop from the command line you can use the IIS appCmd tool. To stop:> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd stop apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"and to start> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd start apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"Note that when you explicitly force the AppPool to stop running either in the UI (on the ApplicationPools page use Start/Stop) or via command line tools, the application pool will not auto-restart immediately. You have to manually start it back up.What's not to like?There are certainly a lot of benefits to running a background service in IIS, but… ASP.NET applications do have more overhead in terms of memory footprint and startup time is a little slower, but generally for server applications this is not a big deal. If the application is stable the service should fire up and stay running indefinitely. A lot of times this kind of service interface can simply be attached to an existing Web application, or if scalability requires be offloaded to its own Web server.Easier to work withBut the ultimate benefit here is that it's much easier to work with a Web app as opposed to a service. While developing I can simply turn off the auto-launch features and launch the service on demand through IIS simply by hitting a page on the site. If I want to shut down an IISRESET -stop will shut down the service easily enough. I can then attach a debugger anywhere I want and this works like any other ASP.NET application. Yes you end up on a background thread for debugging but Visual Studio handles that just fine and if you stay on a single thread this is no different than debugging any other code.SummaryUsing ASP.NET to run background service operations is probably not a super common scenario, but it probably should be something that is considered carefully when building services. Many applications have service like features and with the auto-start functionality of the Application Initialization module, it's easy to build this functionality into ASP.NET. Especially when combined with the notification features of SignalR it becomes very, very easy to create rich services that can also communicate their status easily to the outside world.Whether it's existing applications that need some background processing for scheduling related tasks, or whether you just create a separate site altogether just to host your service it's easy to do and you can leverage the same tool chain you're already using for other Web projects. If you have lots of service projects it's worth considering… give it some thought…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in ASP.NET  SignalR  IIS   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • Revisiting ANTS Performance Profiler 7.4

    - by James Michael Hare
    Last year, I did a small review on the ANTS Performance Profiler 6.3, now that it’s a year later and a major version number higher, I thought I’d revisit the review and revise my last post. This post will take the same examples as the original post and update them to show what’s new in version 7.4 of the profiler. Background A performance profiler’s main job is to keep track of how much time is typically spent in each unit of code. This helps when we have a program that is not running at the performance we expect, and we want to know where the program is experiencing issues. There are many profilers out there of varying capabilities. Red Gate’s typically seem to be the very easy to “jump in” and get started with very little training required. So let’s dig into the Performance Profiler. I’ve constructed a very crude program with some obvious inefficiencies. It’s a simple program that generates random order numbers (or really could be any unique identifier), adds it to a list, sorts the list, then finds the max and min number in the list. Ignore the fact it’s very contrived and obviously inefficient, we just want to use it as an example to show off the tool: 1: // our test program 2: public static class Program 3: { 4: // the number of iterations to perform 5: private static int _iterations = 1000000; 6: 7: // The main method that controls it all 8: public static void Main() 9: { 10: var list = new List<string>(); 11: 12: for (int i = 0; i < _iterations; i++) 13: { 14: var x = GetNextId(); 15: 16: AddToList(list, x); 17: 18: var highLow = GetHighLow(list); 19: 20: if ((i % 1000) == 0) 21: { 22: Console.WriteLine("{0} - High: {1}, Low: {2}", i, highLow.Item1, highLow.Item2); 23: Console.Out.Flush(); 24: } 25: } 26: } 27: 28: // gets the next order id to process (random for us) 29: public static string GetNextId() 30: { 31: var random = new Random(); 32: var num = random.Next(1000000, 9999999); 33: return num.ToString(); 34: } 35: 36: // add it to our list - very inefficiently! 37: public static void AddToList(List<string> list, string item) 38: { 39: list.Add(item); 40: list.Sort(); 41: } 42: 43: // get high and low of order id range - very inefficiently! 44: public static Tuple<int,int> GetHighLow(List<string> list) 45: { 46: return Tuple.Create(list.Max(s => Convert.ToInt32(s)), list.Min(s => Convert.ToInt32(s))); 47: } 48: } So let’s run it through the profiler and see what happens! Visual Studio Integration First, let’s look at how the ANTS profilers integrate with Visual Studio’s menu system. Once you install the ANTS profilers, you will get an ANTS menu item with several options: Notice that you can either Profile Performance or Launch ANTS Performance Profiler. These sound similar but achieve two slightly different actions: Profile Performance: this immediately launches the profiler with all defaults selected to profile the active project in Visual Studio. Launch ANTS Performance Profiler: this launches the profiler much the same way as starting it from the Start Menu. The profiler will pre-populate the application and path information, but allow you to change the settings before beginning the profile run. So really, the main difference is that Profile Performance immediately begins profiling with the default selections, where Launch ANTS Performance Profiler allows you to change the defaults and attach to an already-running application. Let’s Fire it Up! So when you fire up ANTS either via Start Menu or Launch ANTS Performance Profiler menu in Visual Studio, you are presented with a very simple dialog to get you started: Notice you can choose from many different options for application type. You can profile executables, services, web applications, or just attach to a running process. In fact, in version 7.4 we see two new options added: ASP.NET Web Application (IIS Express) SharePoint web application (IIS) So this gives us an additional way to profile ASP.NET applications and the ability to profile SharePoint applications as well. You can also choose your level of detail in the Profiling Mode drop down. If you choose Line-Level and method-level timings detail, you will get a lot more detail on the method durations, but this will also slow down profiling somewhat. If you really need the profiler to be as unintrusive as possible, you can change it to Sample method-level timings. This is performing very light profiling, where basically the profiler collects timings of a method by examining the call-stack at given intervals. Which method you choose depends a lot on how much detail you need to find the issue and how sensitive your program issues are to timing. So for our example, let’s just go with the line and method timing detail. So, we check that all the options are correct (if you launch from VS2010, the executable and path are filled in already), and fire it up by clicking the [Start Profiling] button. Profiling the Application Once you start profiling the application, you will see a real-time graph of CPU usage that will indicate how much your application is using the CPU(s) on your system. During this time, you can select segments of the graph and bookmark them, giving them mnemonic names. This can be useful if you want to compare performance in one part of the run to another part of the run. Notice that once you select a block, it will give you the call tree breakdown for that selection only, and the relative performance of those calls. Once you feel you have collected enough information, you can click [Stop Profiling] to stop the application run and information collection and begin a more thorough analysis. Analyzing Method Timings So now that we’ve halted the run, we can look around the GUI and see what we can see. By default, the times are shown in terms of percentage of time of the total run of the application, though you can change it in the View menu item to milliseconds, ticks, or seconds as well. This won’t affect the percentages of methods, it only affects what units the times are shown. Notice also that the major hotspot seems to be in a method without source, ANTS Profiler will filter these out by default, but you can right-click on the line and remove the filter to see more detail. This proves especially handy when a bottleneck is due to a method in the BCL. So now that we’ve removed the filter, we see a bit more detail: In addition, ANTS Performance Profiler gives you the ability to decompile the methods without source so that you can dive even deeper, though typically this isn’t necessary for our purposes. When looking at timings, there are generally two types of timings for each method call: Time: This is the time spent ONLY in this method, not including calls this method makes to other methods. Time With Children: This is the total of time spent in both this method AND including calls this method makes to other methods. In other words, the Time tells you how much work is being done exclusively in this method, and the Time With Children tells you how much work is being done inclusively in this method and everything it calls. You can also choose to display the methods in a tree or in a grid. The tree view is the default and it shows the method calls arranged in terms of the tree representing all method calls and the parent method that called them, etc. This is useful for when you find a hot-spot method, you can see who is calling it to determine if the problem is the method itself, or if it is being called too many times. The grid method represents each method only once with its totals and is useful for quickly seeing what method is the trouble spot. In addition, you can choose to display Methods with source which are generally the methods you wrote (as opposed to native or BCL code), or Any Method which shows not only your methods, but also native calls, JIT overhead, synchronization waits, etc. So these are just two ways of viewing the same data, and you’re free to choose the organization that best suits what information you are after. Analyzing Method Source If we look at the timings above, we see that our AddToList() method (and in particular, it’s call to the List<T>.Sort() method in the BCL) is the hot-spot in this analysis. If ANTS sees a method that is consuming the most time, it will flag it as a hot-spot to help call out potential areas of concern. This doesn’t mean the other statistics aren’t meaningful, but that the hot-spot is most likely going to be your biggest bang-for-the-buck to concentrate on. So let’s select the AddToList() method, and see what it shows in the source window below: Notice the source breakout in the bottom pane when you select a method (from either tree or grid view). This shows you the timings in this method per line of code. This gives you a major indicator of where the trouble-spot in this method is. So in this case, we see that performing a Sort() on the List<T> after every Add() is killing our performance! Of course, this was a very contrived, duh moment, but you’d be surprised how many performance issues become duh moments. Note that this one line is taking up 86% of the execution time of this application! If we eliminate this bottleneck, we should see drastic improvement in the performance. So to fix this, if we still wanted to maintain the List<T> we’d have many options, including: delay Sort() until after all Add() methods, using a SortedSet, SortedList, or SortedDictionary depending on which is most appropriate, or forgoing the sorting all together and using a Dictionary. Rinse, Repeat! So let’s just change all instances of List<string> to SortedSet<string> and run this again through the profiler: Now we see the AddToList() method is no longer our hot-spot, but now the Max() and Min() calls are! This is good because we’ve eliminated one hot-spot and now we can try to correct this one as well. As before, we can then optimize this part of the code (possibly by taking advantage of the fact the list is now sorted and returning the first and last elements). We can then rinse and repeat this process until we have eliminated as many bottlenecks as possible. Calls by Web Request Another feature that was added recently is the ability to view .NET methods grouped by the HTTP requests that caused them to run. This can be helpful in determining which pages, web services, etc. are causing hot spots in your web applications. Summary If you like the other ANTS tools, you’ll like the ANTS Performance Profiler as well. It is extremely easy to use with very little product knowledge required to get up and running. There are profilers built into the higher product lines of Visual Studio, of course, which are also powerful and easy to use. But for quickly jumping in and finding hot spots rapidly, Red Gate’s Performance Profiler 7.4 is an excellent choice. Technorati Tags: Influencers,ANTS,Performance Profiler,Profiler

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  • How to measure disk performance?

    - by Jakub Šturc
    I am going to "fix" a friend's computer this weekend. By the symptoms he describes it looks like he has a disk performance problem with his 5400 rpm disk. I want to be sure that disk is the problem so I want to "scientificaly" measure the performance. Which tools do you recommend me for this job? Is there any standard set of numbers I can compare the result of measurement with?

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  • Windows XP IIS5 performance across Network

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  • Improving terminal server performance for a specfic app

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