Fiddler plugin – neXpert performance analysis

An interesting add-in for Fiddler - Microsoft neXpert. It “automates the classic performance best practice checks and produces a HTML report on the issues found in a Fiddler capture”.

Visual Studio 2008 at 100% CPU scrolling text

The Visual Studio text editor has been feeling very sluggish. It finally got so annoying, when just holding down the down arrow to scroll down was taking 1 second per line (and devenv.exe would peak in CPU % Task Manager), that I decided I needed to figure out what the problem was.

Running devenv.exe with the /safemode option resulted in a well-performing editor, so the next step was to isolate which add-in(s) was the culprit..

1. Resharper 4.5 nightly build..
2. TestDriven.NET
3. Gallio
4. CAT.NET
5. Spelling add-in
6. VisualSVN
7. Visual Studio SDK
8. WiX

And that did the trick. Looks like this bug has been identified in WiX, so hopefully the next public build will resolve the problem. In the meantime, the workaround is to unload any WiX projects in your solution.

Now to re-install everything again :-)

SAS and typeperf

It’s nice to learn new things.

For instance at last week’s Adelaide SQL User Group, as part of Dan Grecu’s talk on how he manages his SQL Server infrastructure, he showed a script that uses typeperf.exe. That was new to me, even though it’s been around since at least Windows NT 4.0. It records the values of specified performance counters to the command window or a file.

Then this morning on the bus I was listening to RunAs Radio episode 101, where Alan Sugano mentioned SCSI, SATA and SAS. I’d heard of the first two, but not the third. Fortunately Richard asked Alan to define them. So SAS uses SCSI but rather than having 8 or 16 devices all sharing the same bus, each device is on its own connection, so they don’t have to wait their turn to send or receive data. For this reason it sounds like it’s becoming quite popular, particularly for servers.