Windows Phone Application Performance Analysis

When you create an application with a killer user interface, you ought to consider various performance parameters of your application as well. There are certain eligibility performances criteria your application must pass to be accepted in the Marketplace. These criteria may check your application for

• Maximum memory usage
• Launching time of your application
• How responsive is your application

There is the Market Place Test Kit you can use to test the likelihood of your application accepted by the marketplace.

Measuring performance of your application should always be an essential task of your application creation life cycle.



In Windows Phone 7.1 you get a Performance Analysis Tool. This tool helps you to do analysis on

• CPU usage
• Memory Usage
• How you are handling garbage collection
• What is your application frame rate

You get the performance analysis tool by either by pressing ALT+F1 or selecting it from Debug menu option.



There are few thumb rules you need to follow to get the best results out of the performance analysis tool

• You should target the device rather emulator
• Run the project in release mode rather than debug mode

Just after clicking on Start Widows Phone Performance Analysis, you will get an empty performance log created for you in the solution explorer.



When you choose for performance analysis, you will be prompted to choose from two options

• Execution
• Memory 

Choose your option and click on Launch Application. The application will be launched with performance analysis.

Come back to Visual Studio and click on Stop Profiling. You will get progress messages that analyzed data is being created.





When you click on the .sap file you will get a performance graph as below,



Frame Rates provides information about the number of frame redrawn each second. This information is only available when the display UI is getting updated. Windows Phone 7 application should have 30 to 60 second frame rate per second.

In CPU usage there are four colors and each color have its own significant meaning.



Memory usage says the amonut of phone memory used in your application. It is measured in Megabytes 

The storyboard gives information about animation in the application. There are two types of animation which are represented by two different colors.



Image loads says about image load as assets into the phone memory.

GC events say about when garbage collector collects free memory.

By having all the information discussed above you can very much do performance analysis of your application. Have a good time writing good performance centric application

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