DotNet Code Optimization Rob Wilburn

I found a great blog post the other day by Shaun Walker on the performance tuning done for DotNetNuke 4.4.0. It is actually an old post (posted on 12/5/2006) but it is still worth reading.

One of the tools they used to optimize DotNetNuke was ANTS Profiler. ANTS Profiler measures how many times each method is called and how long each execution takes. When you run the profiler on an application you get the following statistics:

1. The number of times the method ran
2. The sum of the durations of each execution including child method execution times
3. The sum of the durations of each execution without child method execution times
4. The maximum amount of time an individual execution took including child method execution times
5. The minimum amount of time an individual execution took including child method execution times

I ran the profiler on a web project that has not gone through any optimizations lately and it gave me some great data. I found that most of the time used was taken up by a small percentage of the total methods profiled. If we can half the execution time of the slowest ten methods then the average page load time on the site would drop by 33%. On a slow website this tuning could make a world of difference.

ANTS Profiler isn’t free, unfortunately, but I think the information it can provide is well worth the nominal cost.

ANTS Profiler by Red Gate

• Posted In Engineering, QA, IT