Wednesday 16 May 2012

Performance of string manipulation - part one

One thing that every developer fights with (or should!!) is performance.  It's ok writing an application that works well for one developer sat messing about on a development server that only he is using, but it is very different when it's thousands of users all hitting the same server, under realistic but heavy load.


One particularly costly task is string manipulation.  Building up a string can use a relatively large chunk of memory and take a surprising amount of processor power.  So I decided to perform some performance tests to see how this could be improved.


The first test I did was comparing the use of a local variable against a non-database field.  I did this test by taking the following string...


" ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 01234567890 abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 01234567890"


...and then using putitem/id with a counter to add this 20,000 times, with the following results...

  • Non-database field = 02:42.14, 02:44.64, 02:43.44 (almost 3 minutes).
  • Local variable = 00:00.22, 00:00.23, 00:00.22 (less than 1 second).
  • Component variable = 00:00.22, 00:00.22, 00:00.22 (less than 1 second).
  • Global variable = 00:00.22, 00:00.22, 00:00.23 (less than 1 second.


As you can see, when manipulating a string you should never use a field to hold the string.  Having said that, it doesn't seem to make any difference which type of variable you use.  I continued testing the different types of variables with 200,000 and 2,000,000 iterations, without seeing the times deviate from each other.

Summary: Use a variable (any kind of variable) but not a field.

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