Archives for Software Dev - Page 50
Figuring out CPU usage on dual core (dual/quad core) systems
Introduction All I wanted to do was see how much CPU was being used by my simple program ( an infinite loop). This used to be a matter of writing…
Is SQL Server’s locking overly pessimistic (and what to do about it)?
Introduction For a while now, the production database that is part of my current project, has been throwing SQL Server deadlock exceptions. Deadlocks are usually caused by resource contention –…
Recycling Application Pools in IIS (why it is NOT a best practice)
Introduction Microsoft said – ‘Please recycle every 29 hours’ – and without giving it another thought, we all blindly did ; I never gave this ‘default IIS behavior’ any thought…
The ‘params’ keyword in c#
Introduction I was confused by the appearance of ‘params’ in the signature of a method (see example snippet below). It seemed redundant – even if I removed it, the method…
Async and Await, an easy way to keep your user interface responsive
Introduction Normally, when you invoke a method, it is invoked synchronously on your calling thread. Since you made no provision to ‘unblock’ the main thread, the method essentially ‘blocks’ the…
Improving throughput of your Microsoft stack web app
The flow of a web request (from IIS inwards) The request is still handed over to on an IIS I/O thread. And immediately posts the request to the CLR Threadpool…
POST-ing data using Fiddler
Introduction Composing requests in Fiddler is easy (just use the ‘Composer’ tab). However, by default, fiddler is set to do ‘GET’ requests – which is what a majority of users…
Load Testing with Fiddler and StresStimulus
Introduction As web applications grow in complexity, obtaining a good ‘baseline’ around their load handling capabilities becomes important. Obtaining a baseline is usually a pre-requisite to isolating any performance bottlenecks.…
A (quick) performance review of healthcare.gov
Introduction Which ecommerce website received the most hits on Oct 1? If your answer was , you would be wrong. It was the newly launched – as per these ;…
Move over nUnit (and MSTest), there’s a new kid in town (xUnit)
Introduction xUnit is a newish test framework developed by the original contributor to NUnit. In essence, he seems to have distilled the best features of the various test frameworks out…