[RESOLVED] Mono 2.6.3 and performance

[ntg]

Recently, I wanted to run a Visual Basic application under Mono. The application itself has to do mainly with cryptography and involves a lot of DES operations, byte crunching/converting, TCP/IP but not much more and no disk I/O. The core functionality is implemented in a DLL and is wrapped around a simple Winforms project with a few options. My initial goal was to take everything needed to run the GUI, copy it to a Linux distro and have it run under Mono without performing any compilation under Linux.

I quickly discovered that I had to target Mono 2.6 in order to reach my goal, so I aimed for openSUSE 11.2 with Mono 2.6.3. Initially, my efforts failed because calls to the VB namespace were returning incorrect results. I had to replace a lot of CType, CInt, CBool, CByte, CLng, Asc, Chr method calls with calls to various classes of the System namespace. After some work at that, I was able to run the GUI application under openSUSE successfully. A few errors still remain but I have worked around those.

What striked me was the performance of the application under Mono. I have a way to stress-test my application. I fired it up and started to stress-test the application under Mono. Normally, the GUI application shows status messages and informs the user about what is happening. When the status messages where displayed, the application performed pitifully under openSUSE. Once the status messages were disabled, the application worked faster under openSUSE than under Windows. I was running openSUSE under VMWare and the stress test application in the Windows VM host. The GUI application took 59 seconds to finish when running in the Windows VM host but only 46 seconds when running in the openSUSE virtual machine. In both cases, the stress test executes the same commands serially (single thread) and screen output was turned off.

That strikes me as a bit odd. I've heard before that Winforms projects under Mono perform poorly but my experience seems to suggest that server-based applications perform better under Mono than under Windows. The ported application doesn't use anything like WCF, Remoting (and thus serialization) so I don't know how Mono fares on those. Still, these results caught me by surprise - I was just curious about the performance of Mono when I started the stress test but now I keep wondering how is that performance difference possible.

I just wanted to hear about other people with experience on Mono, specifically about performance of server applications.

[ntg]

Well, I guess that I must be one of the very few people interested in Mono...

[gep13]

Hey,

I think it is fair to say that there aren't mainly people on this forum interested in Mono, but in general, it has quite a following.

I have Mono 2.6.1 installed on my server, for running my web site, but I haven't yet installed 2.6.3, but I will, since there are some bugs in 2.6.1. that I need to get fixed.

I haven't used Mono for anything other than web sites though, so can't really be of much help, sorry.

Gary

[ntg]

What would then be an appropriate forum to post this Gary?

[gep13]

Hey,

I think you might have more luck posting for at the Mono Forums:

http://go-mono.com/forums/

They are quite active, and you get the benefit of the main developers contributing to the forum.

Gary

[ntg]

Oh, I thought you were referring to another forum within VBForums! I may try that, thanks for the lead Gary.

[ntg]

Gary, I just wanted to thank you for your great pointer. The people at the Mono forums are being very helpful indeed.

[gep13]

Hey,

Not a problem at all. I have found them to be very helpful in the past as well.

What was the outcome of your question by the way? Can you link to your post in that forum?

Gary

[ntg]

Here's the related link. The verdict is that Mono may perform some optimizations better than .Net and I shouldn't sweat this at all. What's most important for me is that I got a glimpse of devs that are actively supporting VB under Mono. Since I came across several VB-related issues, I feared that Mono is good only if you're using C# but it turns out that this is not the case.

[mendhak]

I'm interested in using ASP.NET on Ubuntu but haven't started it yet. This could be interesting though, now that I know you've tried it

[DeanMc]

I'm also being dragged into the mono scene by penagate. Ive been doing some digging and it seems that they may be implementing wpf or at least testing it under the code name olive.

[gep13]

Hey,

Yeah, the Olive project has been on the go for a while, but I haven't played with it yet, mainly because my Linux system doesn't actually have a UI, just a web interface

Mend, have you found any pre-cooked RPM's for Ubuntu, or were you planning on compiling from source. I wouldn't use version 2.6.1, which is the version I currently have installed, there are quite a few issues with it with regard to ASP.Net, use the latest 2.6.3, which claims to have fixed them, although I haven't tested it out yet.

Gary

[ntg]

If you want to use 2.6.3, you can't use it on Ubuntu - isn't that right Gary?

[gep13]

Hey,

I don't know if "can't" is the right term. You won't get any ready to installed compiled versions, like you do for OpenSuse, but there is nothing to stop you taking the source code and compiling it yourself, that is what I did on my RedHat box.

Gary

[ntg]

Right. I've read somewhere that Mono is considered a core package for Ubuntu so upgrades to newer Mono versions tend to be slow to roll out officially.

[gep13]

Yeah, that sounds about right. A couple shell commands though, and you can have the most up to date one.

Gary

[ntg]

Just an update for those interested, the guys at Mono fixed the problem I reported - not directly related to my original post but it's nice to see that they fix reproducible problems fairly quickly.

[gep13]

Hey,

I noticed that there was a new version released, 2.6.4, but I haven't played with it yet.

Yeah, they are normally quite good at responding to bugs, and issuing fixes.

Gary

[mendhak]

What surprises me a bit is that in (at least) the latest versions of Ubuntu, especially 10.04, quite a few apps have been created in Mono. I didn't realize it was that popular. Whereas on FC9, I had struggled to get mono running. I also tried developing with Mono in C# and it's... well, I could write a thread about it, but the summary is that it's always going to be a generation behind .NET, understandably so. It would be nice if Mono were worked on by MS, which is one of the things that their new open source 'evangelist' could do... but ah well.

[gep13]

Hey,

As far as I was aware, Microsoft are working with Novell, and they are contributing source to the Mono Project.

You are right though, they will always be one step behind, but I think that step will gradually get smaller, and smaller.

Gary