String vs. StringBuilder - How they Work?

 

String objects in .net are immutable. Once the string has been created, the value can't be changed. When you type s = s + "foo";, you actually discard the old s and create a new string object containing the result of the concatenation. When repeated several times, you end up constructing many temporary string objects.

StringBuilder, on the other hand, represents a mutable string. The class itself contains quite a few methods to change the contents of the string. This includes appending new strings to the end - the most common operation by far. Internally, StringBuilder reserves a buffer of memory which is used only partially at first (usually). Concatenations that fit into the buffer are just pasted in and the string length is changed. If the new resulting string wouldn't fit into the buffer, a new buffer is allocated and the old contents are moved in. In no case new objects need to be created.

The sore points of StringBuilder are the construction cost (which makes the "magic number" practically always at least 3) and the cost of allocating a new buffer when the resultant string would exceed the current buffer size. The latter one explains why the preknowledge (or a good estimation) of the resultant string size helps so much: StringBuilder can just allocate a sufficient buffer once.

.net String vs. StringBuilder - concatenation performance

Technorati Tags: .NET Example, .NET Framework, C# .NET