Hello, I am Laszlo

Struct Serialization with Spans

12/28/2018

In one of the books, Pro .Net Performance, an some examples are mentioned for struct serialization on the chapter of 'Code Generation'.

Since the book was released the C# has evolved, and some of the constraints has been removed earlier existed. Also with C# 7.2 and above we have Span at the hands of the developers so performance improvements can be implemented.

In this post, I will take the 2 deserialization examples of the book and compare it with the latest constructs available with Span and unmanaged generics.

Serialization task

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ConcurrentDictionary over List 4

12/15/2018

In the previous post I have shown how we can use a new List with a ConcurrentDictionary in a thread safe manner.In this post I will show to other methods, to achieve the same.

Immutable Structures

One way to make our intentions clearer is to use immutabe collections. One package is right away available: System.Collections.Immutable

Here is an implementation for the test class to be used. According to my testing the ImmutableArray seems to be the immutable collection, that performs the fastest in this use cases I test.

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No Internet on Azure VM

12/12/2018

I have been using a Virtual Machine on Azure for development purposes for over a year now. I had used this machine several times this week, but from one day to another, "the internet disappeared" on it. Obviously, it was connected to the network, as I was able to log with an RDP session, and even pinging IP-s worked just fine, but no websites were loaded by any browser.

Did some searches on the issue, and found a couple of posts in the topic, but nothing helped.

Symptoms

• Pages don't load in the web browers

• Cannot connect to OneDrive

• My test application could not connect to other Azure resources, like table store

• RDP works

• Ping works

• nslookup fails

• I did not change anything explicitly on the machine

• I did not change anything explicitly on the Virtual Network, Network Interface or Network Security group resources

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ConcurrentDictionary over List 3

11/15/2018

Doing it one way

In the previous post, I have shown why the following type can be dangerous:

ConcurrentDictionary<string, List>

The problem starts when we have multiple threads using (writing and reading) this dictionary at the same time. To avoid state corruption, we need to control this access by making it thread-safe.

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Perfomance testing within Unit tests bad idea

11/10/2018

I have doing performance tests in regular Console apps and BenchmarkDotNet for a while. Recently I have been seeing people doing the same from unit tests. At first it seems to have many advantages to run a unit test to measure how long a certain peace of code runs.

Certain things I noted immediately:

• The time to run a unit tests != the time your peace of code runs

• It is a lot more difficult to measure only a certain portion of an algorithm, you will likely to include measuring test initializers

• Running along with a test framework brings a lot of dependencies, which you would not have in a regular empty console application

• Console out: some test frameworks makes it difficult to write out to the console, for example in xUnit you can use a special dependency: ITestOutputHelper

• Memory profiling is more difficult too: capturing GC heaps for comparisons brings a lot of objects into the view, that are allocated by the test framework

• Test might be run in Debug

• CI/CD pipelines with multiple build agents might measure different results because of different load/underlying hardware

In conclusion, I would still suggest to use regular Release built C# console apps with a well-known benchmark framework for performance testing.

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