Note
Access to this page requires authorization. You can try signing in or changing directories.
Access to this page requires authorization. You can try changing directories.
Improving the performance and fundamentals of your application gives it a feeling of polish and craftsmanship, while saving your customers time, money, battery life, and development effort. Your app will consume less power, improving battery life and reducing carbon emissions. Apps run more smoothly on less expensive hardware. Your customers' productivity increases.
This page provides an overview of the technologies and development tools for measuring, understanding, and refining the performance of your Windows application.
Improve your WinUI 3 app's performance
For a WinUI 3 app built with the Windows App SDK, follow this workflow to improve startup and everyday interactions. Use measurements to choose an optimization, then follow the linked guidance for implementation details.
Measure a baseline
Choose a startup scenario and frequent interactions, such as navigation or scrolling, and set measurable performance goals. Measure a Release build on representative hardware. Record cold and warm startup separately, including when the app becomes meaningfully interactive rather than only when its window appears.
Use WinUI 3 performance profiling to locate expensive UI frames and investigate their CPU cost. If you need help selecting a profiler, see Choosing between Visual Studio Performance Profiler and Windows Performance Toolkit.
Improve startup
Identify the initialization and UI creation that must finish before the user can interact with the app. Defer nonessential work and load additional data progressively, without treating a loading indicator as a completed startup.
Start with WinUI app startup best practices. If XAML creation is a bottleneck, follow Optimize XAML loading for element reduction, deferred loading, and resource management.
Improve responsiveness and rendering
Choose the guidance that matches the bottleneck in your measurements:
| Symptom | Guidance |
|---|---|
| Input or navigation stalls while the app loads data or computes results | Keep the UI thread responsive, including asynchronous I/O, background computation, and UI-thread updates. |
| Layout takes too long, particularly with repeated templates | Optimize XAML layout to reduce unnecessary layout structure. |
| Lists or grids scroll slowly or create too many elements | Optimize ListView and GridView for UI virtualization and smaller item templates; use data virtualization when loading the data itself is the bottleneck. |
Remeasure and prevent regressions
Repeat the same scenarios under comparable conditions after each change, and compare the results with your baseline. Check startup and interaction times alongside memory and CPU use: an improvement in one area can increase costs elsewhere.
Keep the measurements as regression checks for future changes. Use Plan and measure app performance to refine your goals and instrumentation as your app evolves.
What is application performance and why is it important?
Performance is the measure of how effectively your application uses the system's resources to do what you've designed it to do. It covers different aspects of how your program interacts with the underlying device, including:
- CPU usage
- Memory consumption
- Power consumption
- Network and storage utilization
- Animation performance
All of these properties have an element of cost associated with them: for example, how much CPU does my application use? How much of the user's bandwidth will it consume? How fast does this particular page of my application load?
Users expect performance as a fundamental property of the software they use. They want their applications to be responsive and make efficient use of their system's resources. Applications that exhibit poor performance cause frustration, which can lead to reduced user engagement. To provide your customers with the best possible experience, it is therefore crucial to make performance a regular part of your development workflow.
When should you measure application performance?
Application performance can span many stages of the development process. It has implications on everything ranging from your choice of data structure to the technology that you choose for building your application. Keep performance in mind as you are developing your application, and plan to do regular performance testing as part of updating and maintaining your application.
How to approach performance measurement
Here are some suggestions for how to approach testing your application for performance.
- Leverage your knowledge of your application. Understanding the most common scenarios for your users will enable you to spend your time wisely on optimizing the right things. If you have data available on how users interact with your application, this would be a great time to look at it.
- Where are your users spending most of their time?
- What are the most important things that a customer will do with your software?
- What are your application's hardware requirements?
- Set performance goals for your most important user scenarios.
- Be precise about what you are trying to optimize. Is it CPU? Battery? Network throughput?
- Select the tools you will use to do your measurements.
- Apply a scientific mindset when testing. Create benchmarks in a controlled environment. Then, make your change, and re-measure to see how your changes have affected your application's behavior.
- Add regression testing into your test environment. This will ensure that your performance metrics don't regress over time.
Intertwining metrics
While you will typically focus on one area of performance during your analysis, be aware that areas are often intertwined. An improvement in one can cascade into an improvement in the other areas.
For example, fixing power consumption is frequently a synchronization problem. Reducing memory usage can result in reducing the time spent using the CPU. There can also be situations where additional resources spent in one area yield a more impactful improvement in another area—for instance, increasing memory consumption can decrease network or storage utilization through caching.
The decision to make a change depends on what is most important for your customers.
What tools can I use to measure application performance?
There are a variety of different options available for measuring the performance of your Windows application.
If you are not sure what tools to choose, check out the article: Choosing between Visual Studio Performance Profiler and Windows Performance Toolkit.
Visual Studio Performance Profiler
Visual Studio offers tooling to help you monitor your application and give you insights within your source. Visit the resources below to learn about how you can use these tools to optimize your code right from your development environment.
Windows Performance Toolkit
Windows Performance Recorder and Windows Performance Analyzer enable detailed monitoring and analysis of your application and the entire system using Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). See the links below on how to get started.
PerfView
PerfView is an open source monitoring and analysis tool created by the .NET team for investigating .NET performance issues. Because of its ability to decode .NET symbols and managed memory, it is an ideal choice for managed applications.
PerfView Tutorial Series
SizeBench
SizeBench is a utility that helps you investigate and reduce the size of your compiled native code binaries (DLLs, EXEs, and other PE files).
Additional Resources
Blogs and news
Go behind the scenes with developer blogs, written by our performance experts to empower building the best version of your app.
Community and support
- Performance problems in your compile-debug-test loop? Report them in the Windows Dev Performance repo on GitHub.
Performance and Sustainability
Performance engineering intersects directly with the sustainable software movement. Most electrical grids burn fossil fuels to generate electricity. As your application runs on a PC, it consumes incremental power that may be small for a single user but adds up as your user base grows.
Interested in learning how performance engineering intersects with sustainability? Check out the Principles of Green Software Engineering and Microsoft's Sustainable Software blog.
Collaborate with us on GitHub
The source for this content can be found on GitHub, where you can also create and review issues and pull requests. For more information, see our contributor guide.
Windows developer