Try profiling with the Visual Studio profiler in order to get a good measure of your managed code and the native code executing within Silverlight. The profiler will help point you to where you’re spending the most of your time (what the hot path’s are) and whether or not your spending it in framework (SL) code or your own code.
The basics of profiling are:
- Open a Visual Studio Command Prompt (as admin), ‘cd’ to the directory where your DLL and PDB files are (typically your "Debug" folder)
- VSPerfClrEnv /sampleon
- VSPerfCmd -start:sample -output:somefile.vsp VSPerfCmd -globalon VSPerfCmd -launch:"c:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" -args:""
- VSPerfCmd -shutdown
- VSPerfClrEnv /off
You can find detailed instructions on using the profiler on my blog:http://www.nachmore.com/2010/profiling-silverlight-4-with-visual-studio-2010/
If you find that you are spending time within Silverlight, track down the code path to see where your code is triggering the expensive calls, so that you can then investigate specific solutions based on the cause of the slow down.
Update :
Performance Wizard for Silverlight – taken from VS2010 SP1 KB.
Visual Studio 2010 SP1 enables you to tune the Silverlight application performance by profiling the code. A traditional code profiler cannot tune the rendering performance for Silverlight applications. Many higher-level profilers are added to Visual Studio 2010 SP1 so that you can better determine which parts of the application consume time.
For more details refer to article Profiling Silverlight Applications After Installing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack ?