Yesterday, I wrote a quick and dirty ASP.NET HttpModule for displaying the time that a request takes to process. Note that by turning on trace output for a page, you can get timing information for that page. But as far as I understand, and I need to double check this, this only applies to the page lifecycle, which might not have all the information you want in the context of ASP.NET MVC. Not to mention, I just wanted to see a simple number at the end of the page and not have to wade through all that trace output....
UPDATE: Using Coral CDN to serve up my images and stylesheets ended up being a mistake and actually slowed down my site. I’d recommend using Amazon S3 instead if you need high bandwidth fast serving of static content. Coral CDN is probably better for cases when you want to serve up a large file (mp3, mpeg, etc...) and save on your bandwidth usage. It doesn't seem ready to be a general purpose CDN for speeding up your site. I’ll add the ability to this code to use S3. In the meanwhile, this code is still useful by simply restricting the...
Update: I also wrote a more generic version using anonymous delegates for .NET 2.0 as a followup to this post.
Here’s one for the tip jar. Every now and then I find myself concatening a bunch of values together to create a delimited string. In fact, I find myself in that very position on a current project. In my case, I am looping through a collection of objects concatenating together three separate strings, each for a different property of the object (long story).
Usually when building such a string, I will append the delimiter to the end of the string I am...
Tyler, an old friend and an outstanding contractor for VelocIT recently wrote a post suggesting one would receive better performance by passing in an array of objects to the Microsoft Data Application Block methods rather than passing in an array of SqlParameter instances. He cited this article.
The article suggests that instead of this:
public void GetWithSqlParams(SystemUser aUser)
{
SqlParameter[] parameters = new SqlParameter[]
{
new SqlParameter("@id", aUser.Id)
, new SqlParameter("@name", aUser.Name)
, new SqlParameter("@name", aUser.Email)
, new SqlParameter("@name", aUser.LastLogin)
, new SqlParameter("@name", aUser.LastLogOut)
...
Some computer scientist by the name of Donald Knuth once said, Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming. Bah! What did he know? Of course we all know what he meant, but when you take his statement at face value, the claim is a bit vague. What exactly is it that is being optimized? Well speed of course! At least that is the optimization that Knuth refers to and it is what developers typically mean when they use the term optimize. But there are many factors in software that can...
Joel Spolsky follows up on his earlier remarks about scaling out a Ruby on Rails site with this post on Ruby performance. I’m afraid it is a thoroughly unconvincing and surprising argument. He states... I understand the philosophy that developer cycles are more important than cpu cycles, but frankly that’s just a bumper-sticker slogan and not fair to the people who are complaining about performance. A bumper-sticker slogan? That’s a surprising statement considering that FogBugz is not written entirely in C. Is it because Wasabi compiled to PHP or VBScript is saving CPU cycles? Hardly. As one might...