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We can often hear that allocation of objects is “cheap” in .NET. I fully support this sentence because the most important part is its continuation – allocation is cheap but allocating a lot of objects will hit you back as sooner or later garbage collector will kick in and start messing around. Thus, the fewer allocations, the better.

However, I would like to add a few words about “allocation is cheap” itself. This is true to some extent because the typical path of objects allocation is indeed really fast. So-called bump a pointer technique is most often used. It consists of the following simple steps:

  • it uses so-called allocation pointer as an address of a newly created object
  • it increases allocation pointer by the requested size (so next object will be created there

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Zero Garbage Collector on .NET Core

Starting from .NET Core 2.0 coupling between Garbage Collector and the Execution Engine itself have been loosened. Prior to this version, the Garbage Collector code was pretty much tangled with the rest of the CoreCLR code. However, Local GC initiative in version 2.0 is already mature enough to start using it. The purpose of the exercise we are going to do is to prepare Zero Garbage Collector that replaces the default one.

Zero Garbage Collector is the simplest possible implementation that in fact does almost nothing. It only allows you to allocate objects, because this is obviously required by the Execution Engine. Created objects are never automatically deleted and theoretically, no longer needed memory is never reclaimed. Why one would be interested in such a simple GC implementation? There are at least two reasons:Continue reading

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Trace Compass

.NET Core on Linux is still very fresh in 2017. First production deployments are just beginning to emerge. Consequently, development on this platform is only beginning to show up. There is a lack of knowledge and good practices related to virtually every aspect of the existence of this environment. One of them is monitoring and diagnostic aspect. How can we monitor and analyze the health of our application?

The easiest way of getting tracing data is by using official perfcollect bash script and then using Perfview on Windows to analyze this recorded data. This approach has some drawbacks. The main one is are fairly limited analysis results available in PerfView. The second, less burdensome, is the need for Windows to… analyze Linux data. Recently Sasha Goldstein has created a lot of valuable material on this subject and I invite you to review the list posted at the end of this post.

I would like to present another diagnostic option here. This is using the free Eclipse Trace Compass tool. Continue reading

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Book Cover

 

I don’t know if you have a driving license. Even if not, you will surely understand this sublime analogy presented by me. Sometimes, you drive a car and know traffic regulations. You can drive this manner successfully for the whole life. However, if you aim to be a professional driver, an old stager, it takes whole days in a car and sooner or later you get dirty with grease by working with an engine. This is how I see the .NET developer’s life. The vast majority may ride „very well”, knowing the syntax, design patterns, tricks of trade. They are professionals. Yet, there is a small group of geeks, nerds, old stagers, that are looking for something more. They want to understand CLR internals, know how does everything work, how to dig in into memory and how to use raw tools such as WinDbg. I consider this is plainly speaking a mind-absorbing occupation and can draws everybody’s attention, even for a while. The popularity of devWorkshops delivered in Poland  by me and Sebastian Solnica confirms this presumption.Continue reading