Common mistakes made when measuring the speed of code

During times I have seen problematic ways how developers measure the speed and performance of their code. There are some easy tricks that help you make your measurements way better and accurate comparing to measurements made not so well. In this posting I will give you some hints how to get more accurate results when measuring the speed of your code.

1. Don’t use Debug configuration

This is one common problems that developers do. They forget to switch configuration to Release and therefore they are measuring the assemblies that are full of debug symbols and debugger interactions.

Code compiled without debug symbols and other debugger stuff works sometimes hundreds of times faster than Debug version of same code. On live environments you must use code compiled with Release configuration. There is no point to measure Debug code because it brings too much noise and you have no idea how debugger and other tools affect the measuring process.

2. Use Stopwatch instead of DateTime.Now

Measuring the speed of code is often done using DateTime.Now values before and after measuring. This is wrong because resulting time contains also time delays when current thread was suspended by operating system by example.

Read more: Gunnar Peipman's ASP.NET blog

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