One of the areas we’ve gotten a lot of performance feedback from Beta 2 on is loading solutions.  We’ve made a ton of progress addressing the causes of the slowness.  Like on the virtual memory issue I talked about yesterday, we’ve picked a set of “real world apps” – some of the same ones and some different ones to measure solution load time.  Most of them are pretty big.  I haven’t forgotten that I own you some data about how big these “real world” apps are.  That’s next on my list.  Again I’ve obfuscated the names to protect the identities of some of the customers who shared their apps with us but where the abbreviation matches with the VM charts you saw, they are the same app (for example: AG and CB).

The good news is that in most scenarios, we are now faster than VS 2008 (Orcas), in fact in some cases substantially so, for example: AV and TZ are almost twice as fast.  Here is a chart comparing them (Main 21130.00 is the build from the Main branch on Nov 30th).  You’ll notice we still have a few regressions with bugs filed on the more significant ones.  As you can see a couple of measurements are still missing.

The first line (Open Dev10) is just measuring the raw time to start VS (for comparison to loading a solution).  Ultimately, we are not going to get the raw startup time of VS 2010 to be as fast as VS 2008 but we continue to make progress on it and I don’t believe that is the most important metric.  You’ll see below a 1s startup regression in the fix queue and there’s more improvements in the works, however, having startup be aa bit slower isn’t deadly if the rest of it runs pretty fast.

I suspect you are wondering what is “High-end hardware” and what is “Typical hardware”.

• High End: Compaq DC7800, 2.4Ghz, dual core, 2G, 8M L2 cache, 667MHz memory speed, Tier 2 WPF graphics card, SATA 300 w/ 8M disk cache
• Typical:  HP Proliant DL145 1.8Ghz Pentium 4,  single core, 1G, 1M L2 cache, software rendered (graphics card is considered Tier 0 by WPF), ATA 133 w/ 2M disk cache

Here’s our list of active investigations for solution load:

You’ll notice a couple of our internal customers I mentioned in an earlier post (Expression Blend and Exchange) in the list of active fixes and investigations.  BTW: Don’t read that 12/19 (RC) to mean anything.  I don’t know why it says that – our RC plans have nothing to do with 12/19.  I suspect they are just saying that by getting in by 12/19 it will be sure to make it into the RC (which is definitely true).

I’ll continue to update you on other areas as we make progress and I get time to write about them.

Brian