Run time costs of common operations in C#
Disclaimers: 1) The benchmarking methodology below should not be used for very small things like i++. For measuring small things see this . 2) Since writing the below I've modified measure it for integration with linqpad - use that instead. 3) If you still want to read this, be my guest :) Today we debated if Enum.ToString() is too slow to be used. To my surprise it takes 1-5 micro seconds on my core-i7 laptop. If 5 micro seconds is too slow for you, the i nternet has you covered . Naturally, I was curious about cost of other operations so I measured those as well. You can reproduce and extend my experiment by putting the below code into linqpad . The output from the current code on my laptop is: Milliseconds to perform 100000 iterations Enum.ToString() took 411 ms NewGuid() took 31 ms InterlockedIncrement() took 3 ms Lock() took 3 ms i++ took 2 ms static TimeSpan TimeIt(int iterations, string title, Action action) { var watch = Stopwa...