Free C# / .NET Profiler with Silverlight support

World is still lacking a good free .NET / C# / VB.NET / F# Profiler. There are plenty of overpriced tools (some very useful, but expensive).

I need simple profiler for one of my free / hobby projects, so I do not want to pay a premium.

First I tried to download open source project called Prof-It for C#. I was unable to profile anything. Why this is so complicated?

Second, also open source, called slimtune. They say it support .NET 2.0, but I was able to profile .NET 3.5 w/o problems. However no luck with Silverlight.

Third, I download free version of EQATEC profiler. They ask for your name and email address (I HATE TO GIVE MY EMAIL). In lack of options, I surrender my email address. Also, it says, that there is limit of “how many DLLs…”. I didn’t get, what this limit is about, perhaps need to use it a little more, but currently I already got profiling details I needed. The good news is, that EQATEC can profile Silverlight applications with a few easy clicks.

P.S. if you are looking for native C++ profiler, read about Very Sleepy.

Context switch can be 3 times slower in virtual environment such as VMware ESX

Tsuna analyzes how match time it takes to make a context switch. All analyzed chips are Multi-core Intel CPUs. OS / scheduler used – standard Linux Kernel.

Results: depends on what we call a context switch (theoretical / real world) and what we measure is: 1000 ns – 4500 ns (up to 45000 ns – depends on performance penalties involved).

However thing that I didn’t know is – context switch can be 3 times slower in virtual environment such as VMware ESX server or VMware Workstation.

Replacing motherboard with Intel RAID 1 (mirror)

Yesterday I needed to replace motherboard with active boot volume, that consisted of RAID 1 (mirror).

There were two possibilities of where Intel RAID controller (ICH10R) keeps RAID configurations:

  • in controller
  • in RAID HDDs
  • in both places

How things went:

  • Power off
  • Replace broken motherboard with new one
  • Power on
  • First boot slow (perhaps installing drivers)
  • Everything works without doing anything

So my guess is – configuration is kept inside hard disk drives (HDD), and perhaps in RAID controller too.

So if your RAID controller or motherboard has died, you can replace it without need to rebuild RAID volume.

Involved motherboards:

  • EVGA SLI LE
  • EVGA X58 CLASSIFIED 3

P.S. Windows 7 Ultimate didn’t asked to re-activate after replacement.