Sooner or later you’ll need to use a cryptographic hash function. Sometimes it’s to quickly check if two large byte arrays are the same, sometimes it’s for interoperability with some server, and other times it’s to obfuscate a string. In any case, performance of the various hash algorithms varies wildly. Today’s article performance tests all 27 hash algorithm permutations to see which is fastest and which is slowest. Read on for the performance test results!
Posts Tagged performance
List<T> (and SafeList) have a great feature for fast lookups: BinarySearch. However, the list needs to be sorted in order to use it. You could call Sort() first, but that would give back all the performance you got with BinarySearch. It’s better to just keep the list sorted all the time. Unfortunately, there is no function on IList<T>, List<T>, or SafeList to efficiently insert an item into a list that’s already sorted. Today’s article presents an extension function that adds this functionality on to IList<T> and even the non-generic IList so your list will always be sorted for quick lookups with BinarySearch. Read on for the code, unit tests, and a performance test showing the advantages you stand to gain.
C# delegates can be used like function pointers. Assign it once and you don’t have to use an if over and over. But is the overhead of the delegate worth it? Today’s article puts it to the test to see if this a valid performance boost versus just using an if over and over. Read on to see if a delegate is worth your time.
foreach loops are really convenient, but are for loops faster? It’s a simple question, but one that has really wide implications in almost any codebase. Today’s article tests them out to see which is faster for looping over arrays and Lists. Read on to see which is quicker!
Unity’s Time class is an easy way to get the relative time. You can find the time since the app started with Time.time or the time between frames with Time.deltaTime. But what if you want to know the absolute time? You may need to display a clock to the user, send a timestamp over a network, or record when a game was saved. This is where System.DateTime comes in. It’s powerful and offers so much functionality that it’s natural to worry about about how slow it’ll be. So today’s article puts it to the test to find out how much time is being spent in operations like DateTime.Now which gets the current date and time. Is it quick enough that you shouldn’t worry? Read on to find out.
StrangeIoC is a library that can help you build your Unity app with a “pure code” approach. Today’s article addresses one common concern with using StrangeIoC- it uses a lot of reflection. As we know, that’s really slow in Unity. StrangeIoC tries to work around it by letting you control when the reflection takes place so you can put it on a loading screen or some other convenient place. Today’s article finds out just how slow the reflection is to determine if this is really a valid reason to not use StrangeIoC (or other dependency injection frameworks). Read on to find out!
Contrary to what you may have learned in a data structures class, linked lists are virtually always slower than just using arrays. The same goes for array wrapper classes like List. Today’s article discusses why this is the case and tests it out with a C# Unity app to make sure that the real world validates the theory.
Last week’s article compared the performance of arrays with List<T> and found List lacking. This week we’ll optimize both List and array to maximize performance regardless of which you choose to use.
System.Collections.List<T> is used everywhere in C# code. Except for very special cases, it’s the replacement for arrays, linked lists, queues, and most other one-dimensional data structures. This is because it has all kinds of extra functionality, including the ability to grow in size on-demand. Today’s article wonders about how much performance is lost to gain this convenience and tests the List<T> class against the lowly C# array: T[]. How much performance are you giving up with List and why is that happening? Read on to find out!
One type of function was left out of Unity Function Performance: virtual functions. Functions in C# are non-virtual by default and you have to explicitly use the virtual and override keywords to override them. Why not make this the default, like in AS3 or Java? Are virtual functions that much slower? Today’s article finds out! Should you be worried every time you make a function virtual?