C# performance counters impact performance? No, but it seems that Chart.SaveImage does.

A little thought later and it looks like no, they don’t impact performance. What I was seeing was the effect of prepping and drawing a chart – on about the same timescale that I was querying for information.

Diagnosing the problem was straightforward; I crosschecked the processor usage for the tool with perfmon. After configuring it to avoid saving down a chart the processor usage dropped to zero.

It is a good example of misleading yourself while looking at performance stats. I could see usage spiking on a period that looked suspicious. I used the VS 2010 in-built profiler and saw that PerformanceCounter.NextValue() was by far the biggest contributor to CPU time, and put two and two together to make five.

I ran the app for a few minutes, rather than the one minute I originally tested with, and the stats inverted. Chart.SaveImage() was overwhelmingly responsible for CPU consumption, with the calling method, Agent.Graph(), taking up ~71% of samples.

Schoolboy misinterpretation, but as always a bit of thought and investigation soon shows up the problem.

Now. Why is Chart.SaveImage() so expensive, and is there a cheaper alternative?