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

Boxing and unboxing

Boxing and unboxing variables negatively impact the performance of your applications. To improve your application's code, you should do your best to avoid boxing and unboxing – especially when your code is mission-critical. In this section, we will look at what happens when you package (that is, box) a type.

Performing boxing

When a variable is boxed, you are wrapping it in an object that gets stored on the heap. As you know, objects on the heap incur costs, as they must be managed by the runtime. On top of this, you also increase the memory used by the variable, as well as the number of CPU cycles needed to process the variable.

An empty class definition is 12 bytes on a 32-bit operating system and 24 bytes on a 64-bit operating system. This may not sound like a lot. But if a value type is boxed that does not need to be boxed, you will be wasting 12 or 24 bytes of memory unnecessarily.

Now, we will look at what happens when you unbox a variable...