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How to speed up WPF programs?

Asked 2008-10-21T14:24:59.167
50

I love programming with and for Windows Presentation Framework. Mostly I write browser-like apps using WPF and XAML.

But what really annoys me is the slowness of WPF. A simple page with only a few controls loads fast enough, but as soon as a page is a teeny weeny bit more complex, like containing a lot of data entry fields, one or two tab controls, and stuff, it gets painful.

Loading of such a page can take more than one second. Seconds, indeed, especially on not so fast computers (read: the customers computers) it can take ages.

Same with changing values on the page. Everything about the WPF UI is somehow sluggy.

This is so mean! They give me this beautiful framework, but make it so excruciatingly slow so I'll have to apologize to our customers all the time!

My Question:

  1. How do you speed up WPF?
  2. How do you profile bottlenecks?
  3. How do you deal with the slowness?

Since this seems to be an universal problem with WPF, I'm looking for general advice, useful for many situations and problems.

Some other related questions:

wpf performance
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2 Answers

5

I can not add comments, that's why I post a new answer to this: I've found this video from the pdc09 that gives some ideas about how to profile wpf apps and because it helped me lot, I want to share the link:

Advanced WPF Application Performance Tuning and Analysis

answered 2010-06-01T20:30:10.420
2

WPF is meant for computers with modern graphics cards. Do your clients have modern graphics cards capable of running Aero? If your clients have older graphics cards, WPF will fall back to software rendering which runs extremely slow in comparison to hardware accelerated graphics.

You also might want to profile your application to make sure that it is actually WPF that is the slow part. It's possible that there is something else that is actually the bottleneck.

answered 2008-10-21T15:21:45.043

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