Analysing .NET start-up time with Flamegraphs

Recently I gave a talk at the NYAN Conference called ‘From ‘dotnet run’ to ‘hello world’:

In the talk I demonstrate how you can use PerfView to analyse where the .NET Runtime is spending it’s time during start-up:

This post is a step-by-step guide to that demo.

Code Sample

For this exercise I delibrately only look at what the .NET Runtime is doing during program start-up, so I ensure the minimum amount of user code is runing, hence the following ‘Hello World’:

using System ; namespace HelloWorld { class Program { static void Main ( string [] args ) { Console . WriteLine ( "Hello World!" ); Console . WriteLine ( "Press <ENTER> to exit" ); Console . ReadLine (); } } }

The Console.ReadLine() call is added because I want to ensure the process doesn’t exit whilst PerfView is still collecting data.

Data Collection

PerfView is a very powerful program, but not the most user-friendly of tools, so I’ve put togerther a step-by-step guide:

Download and run a recent version of ‘PerfView.exe’ Click ‘Run a command’ or (Alt-R’) and “collect data while the command is running” Ensure that you’ve entered values for: “Command” “Current Dir” Tick ‘Cpu Samples’ if it isn’t already selected Set ‘Max Collect Sec’ to 15 seconds (because our ‘HelloWorld’ app never exits, we need to ensure PerfView stops collecting data at some point) Ensure that ‘.NET Symbol Collection’ is selected Hit ‘Run Command

If you then inspect the log you can see that it’s collecting data, obtaining symbols and then finally writing everything out to a .zip file. Once the process is complete you should see the newly created file in the left-hand pane of the main UI, in this case it’s called ‘PerfViewData.etl.zip’

Data Processing

Once you have your ‘.etl.zip’ file, double-click on it and you will see a tree-view with all the available data. Now, select ‘CPU Stacks’ and you’ll be presented with a view like this:

Notice there’s alot of ‘?’ characters in the list, this means that PerfView is not able to work out the method names as it hasn’t resolved the necessary symbols for the Runtime dlls. Lets fix that:

Open ‘CPU Stacks’ In the list, select the ‘HelloWorld’ process (PerfView collects data machine-wide) In the ‘GroupPats’ drop-down, select ‘[no grouping]’ Optional, change the ‘Symbol Path’ from the default to something else In the ‘By name’ tab, hit ‘Ctrl+A’ to select all the rows Right-click and select ‘Lookup Symbols’ (or just hit ‘Alt+S’)

Now the ‘CPU Stacks’ view should look something like this:

Finally, we can get the data we want:

Select the ‘Flame Graph’ tab Change ‘GroupPats’ to one of the following for a better flame graph: [group module entries] {%}!=>module $1 [group class entries] {%!*}.%(=>class $1;{%!*}::=>class $1 Change ‘Fold%’ to a higher number, maybe 3%, to get rid of any thin bars (any higher and you start to loose information)

Now, at this point I actually recommend exporting the PerfView data into a format that can be loaded into https://speedscope.app/ as it gives you a much better experience. To do this click File -> Save View As and then in the ‘Save as type’ box select Speed Scope Format. Once that’s done you can ‘browse’ that file at speedscope.app, or if you want you can just take a look at one I’ve already created.

Note: If you’ve never encountered ‘flamegraphs’ before, I really recommend reading this excellent explanation by Julia Evans:

Anaylsis of .NET Runtime Startup

Finally, we can answer our original question:

Where does the .NET Runtime spend time during start-up?

Here’s the data from the flamegraph summarised as text, with links the corresponding functions in the ‘.NET Core Runtime’ source code:

Entire Application - 100% - 233.28ms Everything except helloworld!wmain - 21% helloworld!wmain - 79% - 184.57ms hostpolicy!create_hostpolicy_context - 30% - 70.92ms here hostpolicy!create_coreclr - 22% - 50.51ms here coreclr!CorHost2::Start - 9% - 20.98ms here coreclr!CorHost2::CreateAppDomain - 10% - 23.52ms here hostpolicy!runapp - 20% - 46.20ms here, ends up calling into Assembly::ExecuteMainMethod here coreclr!RunMain - 9.9% - 23.12ms here coreclr!RunStartupHooks - 8.1% - 19.00ms here hostfxr!resolve_frameworks_for_app - 3.4% - 7.89ms here

So, the main places that the runtime spends time are:

30% of total time is spent Launching the runtime, controlled via the ‘host policy’, which mostly takes place in hostpolicy!create_hostpolicy_context (30% of total time) 22% of time is spend on Initialisation of the runtime itself and the initial (and only) AppDomain it creates, this can be see in CorHost2::Start (native) and CorHost2::CreateAppDomain (managed). For more info on this see The 68 things the CLR does before executing a single line of your code 20% was used JITting and executing the Main method in our ‘Hello World’ code sample, this started in Assembly::ExecuteMainMethod above.

To confirm the last point, we can return to PerfView and take a look at the ‘JIT Stats Summary’ it produces. From the main menu, under ‘Advanced Group’ -> ‘JIT Stats’ we see that 23.1 ms or 9.1% of the total CPU time was spent JITing: