Mon, April 6, 2009, 07:58 PM under
dotNET
When I created my Visual Studio C#
demos for showing off Tasks versus Threads, I of course created the project in Release mode, but there were 2 additional things that I had to do.
One had little impact, but is important to remember: set the power plan on Windows to "High Performance". Otherwise CPU usage can be throttled by the OS, which is not what you want when you are demonstrating parallelism and 100% CPU usage ;-)
The other had a profound impact and had me puzzled for a bit: use Ctrl+F5 instead of F5. The difference in the time the threads scenario took was humongous. That is because the naïve threads demo creates around 1023 threads and it turns out creating threads under the debugger (F5 case, even in release mode) is measurably slower than not. I should have known that, but I didn't, so sharing it here in case you didn't either: when measuring perf, always use Ctrl+F5 in release mode.
For a lot more on the performance difference between running under the debugger and not, I recommend Joc's blog post:
Why is my app so much slower under the debugger.