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I'm trying to speed up the time taken to compile my application and one thing I'm investigating is to check what resources, if any, I can add to the build machine to speed things up. To this end, how do I figure out if I should invest in more CPU, more RAM, a better hard disk or whether the process is being bound by some other resource? I already saw this (How to check if app is cpu-bound or memory-bound?) and am looking for more tips and pointers.

What I've tried so far:

  • Time the process on the build machine vs. on my local machine. I found that the build machine takes twice the time as my machine.

  • Run "Resource Monitor" and look at the CPU usage, Memory usage and Disk usage while the process is running - while doing this, I have trouble interpreting the numbers, mainly because I don't understand what each column means and how that translates to a Virtual Machine vs. a physical box and what it means with multi-CPU boxes.

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Rohith
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2 Answers2

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Start > Run > perfmon.exe

Performance Monitor can graph many system metrics that you can use to deduce where the bottlenecks are including cpu load, io operations, pagefile hits and so on.

Additionally, the Platform SDK now includes a tool called XPerf that can provide information more relevant to developers.

Chris Becke
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Random-pausing will tell you what is your percentage split between CPU and I/O time.

Basically, if you grab 10 random stackshots, and if 80% (for example) of the time is in I/O, then on 8+/-1.3 samples the stack will reach into the system routine that reads or writes a buffer. If you want higher precision, take more samples.

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Mike Dunlavey
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