New Server, Optimizations

So we got a new server at work to run my ETL program on.  It's a HP blade with two duel core AMD Opterons and 10GB of ram.  We installed Windows Server 2008 on it and a version of Visual Studio Team Suite so now I have some useful profiling tools.  I found out my program spends 10% of its time on the ToLower() string command.  Our CRM system is weird with strings and *sometimes* returns attribute types with capitals and *sometimes* does gives them all in lowercase depending on where you get them from.  The problem ended up being in this function, which was a pretty big bottleneck:

public static string getAttributeType(string entity, string attribute)
{

    foreach (CRMAttribute attrib in attributes)
    {
        if (attrib.entityName.ToLower() == entity.ToLower()
            && attrib.attribute.ToLower() == attribute.ToLower())
        {
            return attrib.type;
        }
    }
}

I hadn't realized it would be called so much, so I replaced it with a hash lookup and now it goes much faster.  I always liked how profiling tools show you such unexpected results when you get into a project of this magnitude.

The other bottleneck is threads waiting on other threads... I'm not sure what I can do about this but I'm going to be investigating.  There isn't too much time I have to be working on optimizations because the majority of the program is it spending all of its time publishing to the CRM webservice which we can't speed up.