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Application performance always matters. Sometimes critically, sometimes subtly, but it’s never irrelevant. While many developers rightly caution that “premature optimisation is the root of all evil,” the opposite mistake, ignoring performance until it becomes a serious issue, can be just as problematic.

This talk explores the practical aspects of performance optimisation in .NET. We’ll look at proven strategies for monitoring, identifying, analysing, and iteratively improving applications. You’ll learn how to approach the performance lifecycle, from monitoring applications in production and pinpointing the best areas to optimise, to investing valuable engineering time where it counts most.

Through a worked example, we’ll follow a feature through the optimisation cycle. We’ll profile the application, design benchmarks, theorise improvements, and iteratively refine the implementation to reduce allocations and execution time, while balancing performance gains with code readability and maintainability.

Along the way, you’ll learn how to use tools like dotTrace, dotMemory, and BenchmarkDotNet to target areas for improvement and validate gains. We’ll discuss common optimisation opportunities, from smarter memory usage and fewer allocations to more efficient execution flow.

By the end of this session, you’ll leave with practical techniques to write faster, more efficient .NET code, along with the judgment to know when optimisation is worth the trade-off, and when it’s not.

NDC Conferences

A conference talk transcript covering practical .NET application performance optimization. The speaker walks through a data-driven performance engineering loop: observing production systems, identifying bottlenecks via CPU and memory profiling (using JetBrains dotTrace/dotMemory), writing benchmarks with BenchmarkDotNet, making small targeted code changes, and validating results. A real-world demo uses an OpenTelemetry SQL statement processor, demonstrating optimizations including pre-sizing StringBuilders, reusing shared StringBuilders with lock-free atomic operations, replacing Hashtable with ConcurrentDictionary to eliminate boxing, using Span-based APIs to avoid substring allocations, and switching to ArrayPool with ref structs to eliminate heap allocations entirely. The talk also covers sustainable performance engineering practices: setting SLOs, avoiding premature optimization, documenting performance-sensitive code, and tracking benchmark results across commits.

Application Performance Optimisation in Practice - Steve Gordon - NDC London 2026