Can a call to WaitHandle.SignalAndWait be ignored for performance profiling purposes?
- by Dan Tao
I just downloaded the trial version of ANTS Performance Profiler from Red Gate and am investigating some of my team's code. Immediately I notice that there's a particular section of code that ANTS is reporting as eating up to 99% CPU time.
I am completely unfamiliar with ANTS or performance profiling in general (that is, aside from self-profiling using what I'm sure are extremely crude and frowned-upon methods such as double timeToComplete = (endTime - startTime).TotalSeconds), so I'm still fiddling around with the application and figuring out how it's used. But I did call the developer responsible for the code in question and his immediate reaction was "Yeah, that doesn't surprise me that it says that; but that code calls SignalAndWait [which I could see for myself, thanks to ANTS], which doesn't use any CPU, it just sits there waiting for something to do." He advised me to simply ignore that code and look for anything ELSE I could find.
My question: is it true that SignalAndWait requires NO CPU overhead (and if so, how is this possible?), and is it reasonable that a performance profiler would view it as taking up 99% CPU time? I find this particularly curious because, if it's at 99%, that would suggest that our application is often idle, wouldn't it? And yet its performance has become rather sluggish lately.
Like I said, I really am just a beginner when it comes to this tool, and I don't know anything about the WaitHandle class. So ANY information to help me to understand what's going on here would be appreciated.
