This article is part of the series An Exercise in Performance Tuning in C#.Net.

Where else could I improve performance? I thought I should inspect the memory usage and garbage collection. For that I found a great little tool from Microsoft, the CLR Profiler, which I found through the MSDN Patterns & Practices series of guides on application performance and scalability. The specific article that I found most helpful was How To: Use CLR Profiler.

Note: the above article was written for the .Net 1.1 version of the CLR Profiler. It does not provide a link to the .Net 2.0 version, so that must be downloaded separately. A few labels have changed between the versions.

I ran the application via the Profiler and began inspecting its results. The first thing I looked at was the Allocation Graph, which shows memory allocations by function, drilling down to the data types used.

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At the highest level, most of the performance comes from ProcessFile. That is not surprising at this point, since the calculations are commented out. Zooming in on ProcessFile, we find the following breakdown:

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And then drilling down once more into processSingleLine:

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Much to my surprise, Enum::ToString is the most intensive operation in processSingleLine. Now, it is true that it is called dozens of times, and the 36.19% shown here is cumulative for all the calls, so I wondered if (a) Enums are inefficient or (b) it was just the shear number of calls.

Looking into (a), I could not find any instances where an Enum was being explicitly converted to a string with ToString(). The Enums are being used as indexes in a Dictionary object. Even though the Dictionary object is declared as a generic Dictionary<T,T> with the Enum as the key type, there must be an implicit conversion going on. Zooming back out of this function, and zooming in on greater detail within the functions, I was able to find that calls to Enum::GetValueField was taking 8.5% of the total processing time (between all functions calling the Enums):

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At least I think that’s how to interpret it. Therefore as a next step in tuning the processing, I decided to try replacing the main Enums with classes of constant (static) strings ‘ no conversion required, they’re strings from the beginning now. For instance, I replaced:

public enum DetailsFields
    {
         Field1,
         Field2,
    …

with this:

public class aDetailsFields
    {
         public const string FIELD_1 = "Field1";
         public const string FIELD_2 = "Field2";
    …

When I re-ran my timing test under all other equal conditions, I found an 11% improvement in performance. Conclusion: Enums are great in many ways, but because of conversion (boxing/unboxing) issues, constant strings or integers are probably better in programs where performance is critical.

Posted with : Tech, Microsoft .NET Framework, Performance Tuning