WPF Performance Tools and Resources

Article
02/02/2010

WPF provides a suite of performance profiling tools that allow you to analyze the run-time behavior of your application and determine the types of performance optimizations you can apply. The following table lists the five performance profiling tools that are included in the Windows SDK tool, WPFPerf:

Tool	Description
Event Trace	Use for analyzing events and generating event log files.
Perforator	Use for analyzing rendering behavior.
Trace Viewer	Record, display, and browse Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) log files in a WPF user-interface format.
Visual Profiler	Use for profiling the use of WPF services, such as layout and event handling, by elements in the visual tree.
Working Set Viewer	Use for analyzing the working set characteristics of your application.

The Visual Profiler tool suite provides a rich, graphical view of performance data. In this screenshot, the CPU Usage section of the Visual Profiler gives you a precise breakdown of an object's use of WPF services, such as rendering and layout.

Visual Profiler display output

For more information, see WPF Performance Suite.

Debug Tracing Support for WPF

The PresentationTraceSources class provides debug tracing support that specifically targets WPF applications. Tracing is a diagnostics system by which an application's progression can be tracked. The tracing statements report information, much the way the WriteLine method is often used. However, tracing statements can be switched on or off by using a configuration file. In addition, the output of tracing statements can be customized.

For other related .NET Framework diagnostic classes, see System.Diagnostics.

WPF Performance Tools and Resources

Debug Tracing Support for WPF

See Also

Concepts

Additional resources