Performance Counters in Server Development

All of you agree with the value of using Performance Counters for server applications.

I would like to know how to implement these using C#.

Usually performance counters have the following attributes:

1. They are shared/global
2. Writing requires locks to ensure synchronization
3. Reading sometimes requires locks too

Is it better to update them asynchronously? What is the best way to开发者_Go百科 make them asynchronous?

I am planning to use the ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem() function. What is your opinion about this?

If my questions seem a bit vague, please look at the HelloWorld WCF service.

I also want to know the following:

1. How many times it's being hit overall and within a certain period
2. Average/min/max response times overall and within a certain period

If any one knows of any specialized ways to do this in .NET or WCF, please let me know.

If you use the .NET classes for that purpose there is no need to manually lock the increment, decrement and query of a performance counter - the framework will do that for you.

If you need to use performance counters in native code you still should rather use InterlockedIncrement() and friends.

I think updating performance counters asynchronously is not such a good idea, but your milage may vary. It could be considered less usefull, if the data about some interesting situation arrives after the fact. In all cases I would not put pressure on the ThreadPool just to update a performance counter. Now, if you need to do the work that triggers the counter in a thread anyway, that would be something different of course.

Generally, I don't think that the updating of a performance counter is really a bottleneck, but rather the gathering of the data that is used to update the counter.

For example, the .NET GC Memory performance counters are only update when a GC actually happens, because tracking the information (in the background) just to update the counters everytime something chances would be too expensive (sorry, no reference here, but there are a coupble of MS blog entries about that particular subject).

Finally, be adviced that WCF already provides a rather large number of counters out of the box, which might cover all you want to now already.

You could use the standard windows performance counters.

This functionality can be accessed from c# using the system.diagnostics.performancecounter namespace. For a C# example see:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics.performancecounter.aspx