Book Image

High-Performance Programming in C# and .NET

By : Jason Alls
Book Image

High-Performance Programming in C# and .NET

By: Jason Alls

Overview of this book

Writing high-performance code while building an application is crucial, and over the years, Microsoft has focused on delivering various performance-related improvements within the .NET ecosystem. This book will help you understand the aspects involved in designing responsive, resilient, and high-performance applications with the new version of C# and .NET. You will start by understanding the foundation of high-performance code and the latest performance-related improvements in C# 10.0 and .NET 6. Next, you’ll learn how to use tracing and diagnostics to track down performance issues and the cause of memory leaks. The chapters that follow then show you how to enhance the performance of your networked applications and various ways to improve directory tasks, file tasks, and more. Later, you’ll go on to improve data querying performance and write responsive user interfaces. You’ll also discover how you can use cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure to build scalable distributed solutions. Finally, you’ll explore various ways to process code synchronously, asynchronously, and in parallel to reduce the time it takes to process a series of tasks. By the end of this C# programming book, you’ll have the confidence you need to build highly resilient, high-performance applications that meet your customer's demands.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: High-Performance Code Foundation
7
Part 2: Writing High-Performance Code
16
Part 3: Threading and Concurrency

Understanding the various types of memory used in C#

There are two main types of memory in C#: the stack and the heap. The heap is further broken down into the small object heap and the large object heap. In terms of physical memory, there is no difference between the stack or heap, as they are both stored in physical memory. Their differences are in their implementations.

When your application starts up, it is allocated a portion of memory. A pointer will be assigned to your application that will be your application's memory starting point. Above the pointer will be the stack, and below the pointer will be the heap. The heap will grow downwards, and the stack will grow upwards, as shown in Figure 3.4:

Figure 3.4 – The stack, heap, and application starting point memory address

The following diagram visually represents the stack and heap for a simple program:

Figure 3.5 – The stack and heap at work

To understand...