Nailgun-Net

Nailgun-Net is a tool to speed up the start up of .Net applications

It keeps itself running in the background listening for commands on a tcp socket. When running an application it communicates with the background process to actually execute the program in a warmed up AppDomain.

While it works in a completely different way from the Nailgun tool for Java, it's compatible with its protocol and so it can be used with the standard nailgun client (ng).

Check out the screencast to see it in action!

How it works

For each program an AppDomain is created
The program is executed in the AppDomain
The AppDomain is destroyed (resources are freed)
In the background a new AppDomain is created
- Call Nailgun.Prepare() in the program assembly
- Default: Preload assemblies in same directory and prejit methods in domain
Next execution uses the warmed up AppDomain

In essence it will make any program slower, however for repeated executions the perceived speed up is usually considerable, although it varies from program to program.

How good is it?

The prototype shows some very good speed ups, without implementing a customized Prepare method in the target program the improvement is around a 30-50% for simple command line utilities.

When using a specialized Prepare method it shows up to a 100% speed increase for moderately complex programs, like the Boo compiler.

Is it compatible with my app?

The algorithm is designed to improve the compatibility with most programs and reduce the risk of introducing bugs in them. Unlike the Java version of Nailgun, static state is not shared across different executions, each program is run in a clean AppDomain. That said, you'll have to try it for yourself.

If your program uses colored output, the server can convert them to Ansi escape sequences if your terminal supports them. The result is not 100% correct but works fine enough most of the time.

How can I make my app faster?

When loading the program assembly it will look for a static method named Prepare in the type Nailgun. If it's found the method will be invoked to warm up the background AppDomain for the next execution.

You can put your logic in this method to prepare your application environment for the next execution. From loading assemblies to filling up caches.

If the method returns a truthy value the default actions will be omitted, otherwise any assembly in the same directory will be loaded and will try to trigger Jit compilation for all the methods in them (Note: this is not supported in Mono).

Roadmap

License

MIT