Start your NGen… A four part NGen walk through

JIT, NGen, and other Managed Code Generation Stuff - NGen: Walk-through Series

“Now that Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 has shipped, we thought it would be a good time to publish a series of articles focused on how to use the NGen technology and how to measure performance benefits from it. This series features hands-on style content, so get your copy of Visual Studio 2010 installed and you’ll be ready to follow along.

The following topics will be covered in the 4 blog posts that make up this series.

       1. NGen: Getting Started with NGen in Visual Studio
       2. NGen: Measuring Warm Startup Performance with Xperf
       3. NGen: Measuring Working Set with VMMap
       4. NGen: Creating Setup Projects

…”

JIT, NGen, and other Managed Code Generation Stuff - NGen: Getting Started with NGen in Visual Studio

“Hey there managed code developer. So you’d like to test drive the NGen technology in the .Net Framework? This article will walk you through how to use NGen for your existing solution in Visual Studio 2010.

To familiarize yourself with the concepts around NGen (how it works and for what style of application/library it makes sense to use), I strongly encourage you to first read through this excellent MSDN CLR Inside Out article around the Performance Benefits of NGen: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163610.aspx. Now assuming you have some background on when to use NGen, let’s get started. I’m assuming you have identified that NGen will likely benefit your application (perhaps your application has been identified as having poor warm startup due to JIT-ing of method calls OR you are working with a library that gets loaded into several processes on a machine and you would like to reduce the library’s impact on the total working set of the machine.)

For the purposes of this walk-through, I assume you already have a Visual Studio solution for your application. This series of steps will provides guidance on how to invoke NGen for your application from within the Visual Studio solution. Using NGen via the set of steps outlined below will result in native images created only on the specific machine where the steps are run. Note also that this article does not provide instructions on how to invoke NGen in an installer package; a future article will talk about that scenario.

…

…”

JIT, NGen, and other Managed Code Generation Stuff - NGen: Measuring Warm Startup Performance with Xperf

“…

This article is part of a series of blog posts intended to help managed code developers analyze if Native Image Generation (NGen) technology provides benefit to their application/library. NGen refers to the process of pre-compiling Microsoft® Intermediate Language (MSIL) executables into machine code prior to execution time.

Startup time is defined as the time it takes for an application from launch to startup such that it is now responsive to user input. It is typically thought of as having two variants, cold startup and warm startup. The time it takes for an application to start up on a machine that has just been booted is typically referred to as cold startup time. The time it takes for the application to start up on its second launch is referred to as warm startup time. The difference between the two is that cold startup time is bound by the need to fetch pages used by the application from disk. In contrast, warm startup is typically only bound by the work the application (and underlying runtime layer) needs to do to start up, since the pages needed by the application under normal circumstances don’t need to be fetched from disk.

Using native images does not necessarily shorten cold startup time since the native image files are significantly larger than their corresponding IL files and may take longer to pull from the disk. We will not talk about cold startup time in this article although that may be a topic we address in a future post. Loading native images however, can help shorten application warm startup time since the CLR does not need to run the JIT compiler on the managed assemblies at application launch time. This article is a walk through to help developers use publicly available tools to evaluate how much warm startup benefit the application will see if NGen were to be used.

We will look at two contrasting scenarios to measure warm startup time, the first will involve an application where most of the managed assemblies being loaded have native images and the second one will involve the same application where most of the managed assemblies will NOT have native images.

…

…”

JIT, NGen, and other Managed Code Generation Stuff - NGen: Creating Setup Projects

“…

The NGen technology is designed to be used during the installation phase of a managed application or library. This article will talk about the various installer technologies available, which one to choose, and how to invoke NGen given that installer technology.

Installer Toolsets

The fundamental thing to know before we take a look at installers is that NGen is a tool that can be run only with administrator privileges. A non-admin user cannot invoke NGen.exe. This means that any installer technology that cannot run with administrator privileges cannot be used to invoke NGen easily. Non-admin installer technologies like ClickOnce sometimes use an MSI wrapper to invoke administrator-only actions like NGen.

There are several tools available to create a Windows Installer file (MSI file) – Visual Studio Setup and Deployment Projects, Install Shield 2010 Limited Edition, Windows Installer XML Toolset (WiX), etc. This MSDN article gives a breakdown of how these tools compare: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee721500(v=VS.100).aspx. For a simple project which just installs a few binaries, the Visual Studio Deployment Project is easy to ramp up on and can quickly produce a workable package. However, for production quality applications, WiX tends to be the installer toolset of choice. Among other benefits, WiX has MSBuild support (which implies you don’t need to install Visual Studio in order to create a setup package) and stores all data in XML files (which makes it easily editable).

The rest of this article will focus on using NGen via the WiX toolset.

…

…”