The latest release of The Server Framework gives you the option of building with FILE_SKIP_COMPLETION_PORT_ON_SUCCESS enabled for various parts of the framework. You can enable it for stream and datagram sockets independently and also for the async file reader and writer classes. This option potentially improves performance by allowing overlapped I/O that completes straight away to be handled by the thread that issued the I/O request rather than by a thread that is servicing the I/O Completion Port that the socket or file handle concerned is associated with.
I’ve been working on some performance tuning for a client of mine recently and whilst much of the tuning has been specific to the details of the their particular server design, eventually I can always get to the point where there are some improvements that can be done to the framework itself. It’s nice to have a “real world” performance tuning scenario as I find that tuning example servers can be pointless as the example may not match a real world scenario.
There are two bugs in the Performance Counter library and example servers that mean that performance counters built with the library and following the examples shown in the example servers will fail to work correctly when viewed remotely from another machine. What’s more the remote instance of perfmon will fail to display any counters from the machine with the broken performance counters installed.
The first problem is that the code that checks to see that the process that has loaded the counter dll has the correct privileges to be able to connect to the shared memory segment that is used to communicate between the service and the counters is broken when it’s called from within svchost.
Today I had a day which I knew from the start would be broken up due to pre-arranged calls and meetings out of the office, and so I decided to deal with a few low importance items on my “todo” list. One of them was to do a proof of concept for a new tool that I might work on. I had a thoroughly enjoyable time hacking an old tool into shape so that I could use some of the technology in the new tool.
The latest release of The Server Framework is now available. This release includes the following changes.
The following changes were made to the libraries.
Admin Library - 6.2
We now support Visual Studio 2010. At present the code has only been tested with the beta and release candidate versions.
New build configuration options. All of these are enabled by defining the option to 1 in Config.h and disabled by defining them to 0; the default state if you do not do anything in Config.
I stumbled on an idea for speeding up C++ builds the other day and it’s not something that I’ve considered before and it really does offer a considerable speed up so I think it may be worth considering in some situations. It has downsides which make it harder to use with my default style of code structuring but the increase in build speed is tempting…
The idea is that of “Unity builds” which I discovered from an answer by Christoph Heindl on Stack Overflow about how to speed up Visual Studio builds.
Previously published
This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here.
I’ve been very busy with other things just recently and so I haven’t been able to spend much time on this project. Work has been busy as I’m working towards a new release of my code and my son Scott was born on 25th January.
My baby son Scott was born today, Jan 25th 2010, at 1.58am. He weighed 6lb 15oz and both he and his wonderful mother are doing fine.
I’m just finishing a batch of work that will be included in the 6.2 release of my IOCP based, high performance windows client and server framework and which improves the performance of the framework. There are two main improvements; the first is that the filtering API is now completely optional. There are now filtering and non-filtering base classes so that you only need to include filtering support if you need it.
As I mentioned a while back I’ve been looking at incorporating some simple performance gains in the framework by following the advice given over at the Windows Server Performance Team Blog. Specifically the advice from part three of the “Designing Applications for High Performance” series of postings.
Whilst I’d done some quick and dirty tests with the FILE_SKIP_COMPLETION_PORT_ON_SUCCESS flag of SetFileCompletionNotificationModes() and all looked good I’m now working my way through my unit tests and adjusting them to work both when this option is enabled and when it’s not (completion dispatch changes somewhat when it’s enabled and my tests are invasive enough to notice this).
