Diagnostic/Benchmarking tool to embed in WPF application

Question

I want to add a diagnostics screen to my application which would test resources like RAM, CPU, WPF performance and compare it to a benchmark.

I am looking for a library or open source project that makes it easy to get a baseline of computing performance (RAM, CPU, GPU, etc) to compare fast machines with slow machines, with a goal of identifying the source of performance problems. I aim to get a high-level answer of which computing resource may be causing a slowdown. This would help focus troubleshooting efforts in the right direction.

I am imagining something like a cross between a standard computer hardware / network performance benchmark tool, crossed with DxDiag (for DirectX) which measures the time it takes to render a bouncing ball, etc.

The ideal solution would be written in .net and have these built in:

• WPF Rendering/shading speed test.

• CPU speed test

• Network (LAN) speed test (throughput and latency)

• RAM speed test

• Display the memory used by the application, and how much memory is available.

What open source project or off-the-shelf library do you recommend?

Additional Information:

My application is used by professionals, contains mostly textual information, a few icons, plenty of shading and a few little mouse-activated animation effects here and there. I aim to get a high-level answer of which computing resource may be causing a slowdown.

Answer 1

I haven't found anything quite like what I'm looking for, however, this article may prove useful, as it shows how to measure how long it takes to render some WPF.

Answer 2

For Vista machines and higher you can access the Windows Experience Index scores. This would give you a high level glance on what could be the bottleneck on a system (CPU, video card, memory, or disk drive).

Each time a test is done it creates a file in %Windows%\Performance\WinSAT\DataStore\

You can simply check for the one with the most recent timestamp and read the values directly. Just read the elements between the tags.

Answer 3

It's not for embedding, but are you aware of the WPF Performance Suite?