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Improving the performance and fundamentals of your application gives it a feeling of polish and craftsmanship, while saving your customers time, money, battery life, and development effort. Your app will consume less power, improving battery life and reducing carbon emissions. Apps run more smoothly on less expensive hardware. Your customers' productivity increases.
This page provides an overview of the technologies and development tools for measuring, understanding, and refining the performance of your Windows application. If you are writing a UWP application, be sure to also consult the UWP Performance documentation.
What is application performance and why is it important?
Performance is the measure of how effectively your application uses the system's resources to do what you've designed it to do. It covers different aspects of how your program interacts with the underlying device, including:
- CPU usage
- Memory consumption
- Power consumption
- Network and storage utilization
- Animation performance
All of these properties have an element of cost associated with them: for example, how much CPU does my application use? How much of the user's bandwidth will it consume? How fast does this particular page of my application load?
Users expect performance as a fundamental property of the software they use. They want their applications to be responsive and make efficient use of their system's resources. Applications that exhibit poor performance cause frustration, which can lead to reduced user engagement. To provide your customers with the best possible experience, it is therefore crucial to make performance a regular part of your development workflow.
When should you measure application performance?
Application performance can span many stages of the development process. It has implications on everything ranging from your choice of data structure to the technology that you choose for building your application. Keep performance in mind as you are developing your application, and plan to do regular performance testing as part of updating and maintaining your application.
How to approach performance measurement
Here are some suggestions for how to approach testing your application for performance.
- Leverage your knowledge of your application. Understanding the most common scenarios for your users will enable you to spend your time wisely on optimizing the right things. If you have data available on how users interact with your application, this would be a great time to look at it.
- Where are your users spending most of their time?
- What are the most important things that a customer will do with your software?
- What are your application's hardware requirements?
- Set performance goals for your most important user scenarios.
- Be precise about what you are trying to optimize. Is it CPU? Battery? Network throughput?
- Select the tools you will use to do your measurements.
- Apply a scientific mindset when testing. Create benchmarks in a controlled environment. Then, make your change, and re-measure to see how your changes have affected your application's behavior.
- Add regression testing into your test environment. This will ensure that your performance metrics don't regress over time.
Intertwining metrics
While you will typically focus on one area of performance during your analysis, be aware that areas are often intertwined. An improvement in one can cascade into an improvement in the other areas.
For example, fixing power consumption is frequently a synchronization problem. Reducing memory usage can result in reducing the time spent using the CPU. There can also be situations where additional resources spent in one area yield a more impactful improvement in another area—for instance, increasing memory consumption can decrease network or storage utilization through caching.
The decision to make a change depends on what is most important for your customers.
What tools can I use to measure application performance?
There are a variety of different options available for measuring the performance of your Windows application.
If you are not sure what tools to choose, check out the article: Choosing between Visual Studio Performance Profiler and Windows Performance Toolkit.
Visual Studio Performance Profiler
Visual Studio offers tooling to help you monitor your application and give you insights within your source. Visit the resources below to learn about how you can use these tools to optimize your code right from your development environment.
Windows Performance Toolkit
Windows Performance Recorder and Windows Performance Analyzer enable detailed monitoring and analysis of your application and the entire system using Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). See the links below on how to get started.
PerfView
PerfView is an open source monitoring and analysis tool created by the .NET team for investigating .NET performance issues. Because of its ability to decode .NET symbols and managed memory, it is an ideal choice for managed applications.
PerfView Tutorial Series
SizeBench
SizeBench is a utility that helps you investigate and reduce the size of your compiled native code binaries (DLLs, EXEs, and other PE files).
Additional Resources
Blogs and news
Go behind the scenes with developer blogs, written by our performance experts to empower building the best version of your app.
Community and support
- Performance problems in your compile-debug-test loop? Report them in the Windows Dev Performance repo on GitHub.
Performance and Sustainability
Performance engineering intersects directly with the sustainable software movement. Most electrical grids burn fossil fuels to generate electricity. As your application runs on a PC, it consumes incremental power that may be small for a single user but adds up as your user base grows.
Interested in learning how performance engineering intersects with sustainability? Check out the Principles of Green Software Engineering and Microsoft's Sustainable Software blog.
Our content road map
Performance can be a tricky part of your development process without the right guidance. Ensuring that the right documentation is available for app developers is key to creating faster apps. The road map below details the next pages to be added to this doc set, and in the order that they will be published. If you see something you like or something that's missing, let us know on GitHub via the Feedback links at the bottom of this page! Our goal is to curate a well-rounded and educational doc set for app performance that meets your needs, so we'd love to hear from you. Please feel welcome to submit feedback for this page below with your recommendations for what you would like to see covered in regard to Windows application performance.
| Topic | Description |
|---|---|
| Introduction to performance areas | Descriptions of what performance means in the context of CPU, memory, GPU, etc. |
| Identifying what to measure | Depending on your workload, environment, and other factors, certain areas of performance may be more of a focus than others. Learn what to measure and when with this doc |
| Performance Testing Cycle | Step with us through the performance testing lifecycle which includes setting up your test environment, analyzing your results and making product improvements |
| Understanding the different performance tools | This doc will introduce more performance tooling and go over the use cases and best practices for using them |
| Case Studies | A series of end-to-end scenarios and their journeys through the performance testing cycle |
Collaborate with us on GitHub
The source for this content can be found on GitHub, where you can also create and review issues and pull requests. For more information, see our contributor guide.
Windows developer