Nik Karpinsky

Principal Software Engineer Lead, Visual Studio Profiler

I lead the profiling team within Visual Studio who's mission is to help answer "Why is my code slow?!?!"

Post by this author

A unit of profiling makes the allocations go away

September 25th, 2023
In Visual Studio 17.8 Preview 2 we have updated unit test profiling, allowing you to use any of the available tools in the performance profiler – not just the instrumentation tool. With this change, it’s easy to quickly profile small units of work in isolation, make changes, and then remeasure and validate the impact of the change. ...

Improving Visual Studio performance with the new Instrumentation Tool

April 13th, 2023
Summary With the release of Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6 we are shipping our new and improved Instrumentation Tool in the Performance Profiler. Unlike the CPU Usage tool, the Instrumentation tool gives exact timing and call counts which can be super useful in spotting blocked time and average function time. To show off the tool let’s use...

Case Study: Double performance in under 30 minutes

May 2nd, 2022
Summary Recently I was converting some decompression code to C# so that we could use it cross platform and to aid in our team’s effort to migrate our new analysis process to .NET 6. After I got the initial implementation done with the simplest, cleanest code that I could, I proceeded to profile it to make sure I wasn’t doing anything ...

CPU Usage Tool Improvements

April 5th, 2022
With Visual Studio 2022, we have converted the CPU Usage tool in the Performance Profiler to the profiler’s new analysis engine. This new change provides the tool with better source resolution, incremental/cancelable symbol loading, a performance boost, and a new flame graph.

.NET Object Allocation Tool Performance

June 30th, 2021
With the release of Visual Studio 16.10 comes a new analysis engine for the Performance Profiler, with the .NET Object Allocation Tool being the first tool to be onboarded. This provides the tool with some new features and a significant perf boost. Give it a shot with your C# app and see what spurious allocations you can remove to speed up ...