Performance Considerations for Run-Time Technologies in the .NET - 15 Nov 2001

Overview The .NET run time introduces several advanced technologies aimed at security, ease-of-development and performance. As a developer, it is important to understand each of the technologies and use them effectively in your code. The advanced tools provided by the run time make it easy to build a robust application, but making that application fly fast is (and always has been) the responsibility of the developer. This white paper should provide you will a deeper understanding of the technologies at work in .NET, and help you tune your code for speed. Note: this is not a spec sheet. There is plenty of solid technical information out there already. The goal here is to provide the information with a strong tilt towards performance, and may not answer every technical question you have. I recommend looking further in the MSDN Online Library if you don't find the answers you seek here. I'm going to cover of the following technologies, providing a high-level overview of their purpose and why they affect performance. Then I'll delve into some lower-level implementation details and use sample code to illustrate the ways to get speed out of each technology. Garbage Collection The Basics Garbage collection (GC) frees the programmer from common and difficult-to-debug errors by freeing memory for objects that are no longer used. The general path followed for an object's lifetime is as follows, in both managed and native code: