Introduction

Performance is an important design factor in all software products. If a program runs slowly or displays a spinning cursor, users are likely to become frustrated with the program and look for alternatives. Maintaining a reasonable level of performance requires some diligence on your part, but the earlier you start considering it, the easier it is to catch and fix problems.

Who Should Read This Document

Performance Overview is an essential guide for developers who are new to the area of software performance analysis. This document gives an overview of the factors that govern performance and offers an approach for identifying and fixing common performance problems. It also introduces you to the specific tools and documentation you can use to identify and fix performance problems.

Organization of This Document

This document has the following chapters:

• Developing for Performance describes the factors that constitute performance and the approaches to achieving the best performance in your software.

• Basic Performance Tips describes the common areas of your code to analyze and offers some fundamental performance techniques.

• Performance Tools describes the available tools for doing a performance analysis of your program.

• Doing an Initial Performance Evaluation walks you through the basics of some key tools and shows you how to use them to find performance problems.