Working set is the amount of physical memory that has been assigned by the operating system to a given process. For managed applications, NGen helps to reduce the working set in 2 ways: the application will not need to load the JIT into the process (process specific benefit), and the native image for a library will be shared across multiple managed applications running at the same time (machine wide benefit). As with everything performance related, you can only decide whether using NGen benefits working set for your application by measuring it. This article will walk through how to perform such measurements and what to watch for.
This article contains the following sections: Getting Started with VMMap, The Basics: Is the JIT getting loaded?, The Basics: Using the GAC, Impact of Base Address Collisions (Rebasing): Pre-Vista, Impact of Base Address Collisions (Rebasing): What about Vista?, Cross-Process Sharing of Native Images, Wrapping it up!
Getting Started with VMMap
Download: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/dd535533.aspx
VMMap is a handy tool that provides visualization for process memory usage. In order to easily launch it on a currently running process, use the command “vmmap.exe –p <name_of_process_exe>”.
Read more: JIT, NGen, and other Managed Code Generation Stuff
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