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. If you are writing a UWP application, be sure to also consult the UWP Performance documentation.
What is application performance and why is it important?
Performance in the context of an application usually revolves around cost. How long is it going to take to complete a particular task? How much of the system's resources will be used?
The answers to these questions play a fundamental role in the quality of a user's experience with an application (you can likely recall times where as a user, you have felt frustrated at an application for its poor performance!). As a developer, by keeping performance in mind, you will ensure that users of your applications don't experience that same frustration.
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.
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.
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.
Performance can be a tricky part of your development process without the right guidance. Ensuring that the right documentation is available for app developers is key to creating faster apps. The road map below details the next pages to be added to this doc set, and in the order that they will be published. If you see something you like or something that's missing, let us know on GitHub via the Feedback links at the bottom of this page! Our goal is to curate a well-rounded and educational doc set for app performance that meets your needs, so we'd love to hear from you. Please feel welcome to submit feedback for this page below with your recommendations for what you would like to see covered in regard to Windows application performance.
Topic
Description
Introduction to performance areas
Descriptions of what performance means in the context of CPU, memory, GPU, etc.
Identifying what to measure
Depending on your workload, environment, and other factors, certain areas of performance may be more of a focus than others. Learn what to measure and when with this doc
Performance Testing Cycle
Step with us through the performance testing lifecycle which includes setting up your test environment, analyzing your results and making product improvements
Understanding the different performance tools
This doc will introduce more performance tooling and go over the use cases and best practices for using them
Case Studies
A series of end-to-end scenarios and their journeys through the performance testing cycle
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 feedback
Windows developer is an open source project. Select a link to provide feedback:
Do you want to know how your app is performing and how to make it better? This learning path will help you identify your apps performance and share ways to troubleshoot your Power Apps canvas app.
Demonstrate the business value and product capabilities of Microsoft Power Platform, such as Power Apps, data connections with Dataverse, and Power Automate.
Visual Studio Performance Profiler
Windows Performance Toolkit
PerfView
SizeBench