Benchmarking .NET code

A while back I did a post called Proper benchmarking to diagnose and solve a .NET serialization bottleneck. I also had Matt Warren on my podcast and we did an episode called Performance as a Feature.

Today Matt is working with Andrey Akishin on an open source library celled BenchmarkDotNet. It's becoming a very full-featured .NET benchmarking library being used by a number of great projects. It's even been used by Ben Adams of "Kestrel" benchmarking fame.

You basically attribute benchmarks similar to tests, for example:

[Benchmark]
public byte[] Sha256()
{
    return sha256.ComputeHash(data);
}

[Benchmark]
public byte[] Md5()
{
    return md5.ComputeHash(data);
}

The result is lovely output like this in a table you can even paste into a GitHub issue if you like.

Basically it's doing the boring bits of benchmarking that you (and I) will likely do wrong anyway. There are a ton of samples for Frameworks and CLR internals that you can explore.

Finally it includes a ton of features that make writing benchmarks easier, including csv/markdown/text output, parametrized benchmarks and diagnostics. Plus it can now tell you how much memory each benchmark allocates, see Matt's recent blog post for more info on this (implemented using ETW events, like PerfView).

There's some amazing benchmarking going on in the community. ASP.NET Core recently hit 1.15 MILLION requests per second.

https://t.co/6ndwe0WEqa Core - 2300% More Requests Served Per Second #aspnetcore#dotnet#WebDevhttps://t.co/mOufivMyuO

— Ben Adams (@ben_a_adams) February 18, 2016

That's pushing over 12.6 Gbps a second. Folks are seeing nice performance improvements with ASP.NET Core (formerly ASP.NET RC1) even just with upgrades.

Upgraded stevedesmond.ca to @aspnet 5 RC (from b8), response time went from 20ms to 4ms. Not a typo. @DamianEdwards@shanselman@jongalloway

— Steve Desmond (@stevedesmond_ca) November 22, 2015

It's going to be a great year! Be sure to explore the ASP.NET Benchmarks on GitHub https://github.com/aspnet/benchmarks as we move our way up the TechEmpower Benchmarks!

What are YOU using to benchmark your code?

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