If you’re working on an application built using ASP.NET MVC, you’re hopefully aware of the OutputCacheAttribute attribute which can be used to statically cache your dynamic web pages. By adding this attribute to a controller or action method, the output of the method(s) will be stored in memory. For example, if your action method renders a view, then the view page will be cached in memory. This cached view page is then available to the application for all subsequent requests (or until the item expires out of the cache), which can retrieve it from the memory rather than redoing the work to re-create the result again. This is the essence of caching: trading memory for performance.

Intro

Node.js – it has rapidly become the “new hotness” in the tech start-up realm. With each passing day, the fan base of Node lovers grows larger, spreading their rhetoric like a religion. How do you spot a Node.js user? Don’t worry, they’ll let you know.

One day you’re at a regular user group meeting, sipping soda and talking with some colleagues, when the subject turns to Node. “Have you guys tried Node.js?” asks one of the people in your group. “It’s all the rage. All of the cool kids in Silicon Valley are using it!” “What does it do?” you ask, only to be bombarded with a sales pitch worthy of the best of used car lots. “Oh, it’s amazing!” they reply, sipping their diet coke and shuffling their hipster fedora and backpack with MacBook Pro in it (or something like that), “It’s server side JavaScript. It runs on a single thread and it can do 100,000 web requests a second!” They glance at the group for the oohs and ahhs, but most people just stare back with amazement in their eyes. Then, your hipster Node-loving friend drops the words that start wars: “It’s way better than .NET” – and just like that, your group is hooked. They go home, download the Node.js tools, write “Hello World”, and suddenly they’re on their way to the next user group meeting to talk about how great Node is.

I wanted to point people to this link at DotNetPearls:

http://www.dotnetperls.com/binarysearch

They do an excellent, quick demonstration of List<T>.BinarySearch and show a graph that really drives home how much faster it is for large lists than a regular traversal!

One of the many things that I do at work is run a full-blown Search Engine which I also developed from scratch. This Search Engine feeds all product related information to our websites. A search index consists of a pre-computed collection of products, their properties, a list of words that are correctly spelled, and some pre-computed faceted/guided navigation. A search index, until this week, took up approximately 10.7 gigs of memory. This was becoming too large as we added new products every single day.

In the interest of self-improvement and sharing knowledge, I felt that I should share an update to my last post. I discovered a slightly better way to create the GetMimeMapping delegate/method via reflection that involves less casting and overhead, and is more Object Oriented in a sense. It allows the signature of the reflected method to be Func<string, string> instead of MethodInfo. Code below, note the use of Delegate.CreateDelegate(Type, MethodInfo):

/// <summary>
/// Exposes the Mime Mapping method that Microsoft hid from us.
/// </summary>
public static class MimeMappingStealer
{
    // The get mime mapping method
    private static readonly Func<string, string> _getMimeMappingMethod = null;
/// &lt;summary&gt;
/// Static constructor sets up reflection.
/// &lt;/summary&gt;
static MimeMappingStealer()
{
    // Load hidden mime mapping class and method from System.Web
    var assembly = Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof(HttpApplication));
    Type mimeMappingType = assembly.GetType(&quot;System.Web.MimeMapping&quot;);
    _getMimeMappingMethod = 
	    (Func&lt;string, string&gt;)Delegate.CreateDelegate(typeof(Func&lt;string, string&gt;), 
		    mimeMappingType.GetMethod(&quot;GetMimeMapping&quot;, 
            BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.Public |
            BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.FlattenHierarchy));
}

/// &lt;summary&gt;
/// Exposes the hidden Mime mapping method.
/// &lt;/summary&gt;
/// &lt;param name=&quot;fileName&quot;&gt;The file name.&lt;/param&gt;
/// &lt;returns&gt;The mime mapping.&lt;/returns&gt;
public static string GetMimeMapping(string fileName)
{
    return _getMimeMappingMethod(fileName);
}

}

I recently had a need, in an ASP.NET MVC3 application, to read raw HTML, CSS, JS, and image files from disk and return them to the user… A sort of “pass-through” if you will. Normally I’d have simply routed to a custom HTTP handler per file type or just allowed MVC3 to map existing files to supply its own .NET HTTP handlers and do all of this work for me, but in this case I needed the mapped “directory” to switch behind the scenes based on Session settings… So I ultimately had to feed these files through a Controller and Action Method to gain access to the Session.

As of today I’ve been published in an e-Book offered for free by Red Gate! It is called 50 Ways to Avoid, Find and Fix ASP.NET Performance Issues and contains many useful performance tips which have been contributed by various members of the .NET community. Many tips are ASP.NET MVC specific which is also a plus.

My tip is #3 and has to do with debugging Microsoft symbols.

Get a free copy here – it has already taught me a few things I had never thought to consider!

Most of us have been there: you’ve written a fantastic application that performs perfectly in your Development and/or QA environments, but in Production something goes wrong. Your application spins out of control, utilizing 100% of your CPU. Maybe it simply stops responding as if it were deadlocked. Or maybe it simply crashes randomly. What now?

Logic tells you that you have a problem in the code somewhere that is only encountered in a Production-like environment… and if you could JUST get into the Production box, install Visual Studio (or at least the Remote Debugger), and debug the application, you’d be able to solve the problem. However, you can’t (because it’s Production!), and you can’t replicate the problem in any other environment. Maybe it’s because of stale Development or QA environment data compared to live Production data. Maybe it’s something else. You have no idea where to look to find and fix the problem in your application. For lack of eloquence: you’re screwed.

A friend of mine commented on my last post asking about how much faster the static string.Equals method is than the instance string.Equals method. To satiate both of our curiosities, I have created this benchmarking application:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    var stopwatch = new Stopwatch();
string a = "hello";
string b = "hi";

stopwatch.Start();
for (int i = 0; i < 10000000; i++)
{
    a.Equals(b);
}
stopwatch.Stop();

Console.WriteLine("Instance string.Equals over 10,000,000 iterations: " 
    + stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds + " ms");

stopwatch.Reset();

stopwatch.Start();
for (int i = 0; i < 10000000; i++)
{
    string.Equals(a, b);
}
stopwatch.Stop();

Console.WriteLine("Static string.Equals over 10,000,000 iterations: "
    + stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds + " ms");

Console.ReadKey();

}

The results of 5 runs, where “I” is the instance method and “S” is the static method, and the times are in milliseconds:

As you may or may not know, static methods are usually faster than instance methods. This alone should be a good enough reason to use the static string.Equals method in .NET, but if that doesn’t do it for you, allow me to present a simple example.

string a = "hello";
string b = "hi";
bool result = a.Equals(b);

What is the expected result of these lines? A boolean value of false, of course. And it’d be true if the strings were identical. It’s also false if b is null. But what if a is null?