All Things .NET

Console.WriteLine( "All Things .NET" );

4.05.2002

Interop & Remoting Timings

Based on calling simple int Adder( int x, int y ) implemented in various places.

So far - it's looking like calling through COM Interop layer is ~130 times slower than staying in managed code !?!? Is this right? Well, 130x slower, but still doing 1.3 million ops/second -- so that's usually fast enough. Calling a COM object from an incompatible CLR threading apartment is even more disasterous - only 12 thousand ops/second.

Remoting results show that calling a method on a Serializable object is no different than a local one (after paying for startup costs). An interesting outcome when comparing the two built-in protocols --- TCP protocol is 3x faster than HTTP on remote machine, 6x faster on local machine!

PIII 550 MHz CPU
256 MB RAM
Windows 2000 Server
Visual Studio .NET v 7.0.9466
.NET Framework v 1.0.3705

Your mileage may vary....
Curious how/why operations performed in another AppDomain did not suffer any slowdown due to marshalling...still under investigation - I'm probably doing something wrong?! :-)

400,000,000 repetitions of simple Add function.

	Elapsed Time (ms)	Ops Per Second
Method in same class	1982	201,816,347
Class in same assembly	2994	133,600,534
Class in another assembly (DLL assembly, loaded in calling process)	2263	176,756,518
Class loaded from another AppDomain in same process (Serializable) 2	1922	208,116,545
Class loaded into another AppDomain in same process (MarshalByRef)	59345	6,740
P-Invoke unmanaged c++ DLL	14741	2,713,520
COM Interop - inprocess DLL (STA caller, STA object)	29622	1,350,348
COM Interop - inprocess DLL (MTA caller, STA object)	3294	12,143
COM Interop - .NET COM+ object (ServicedComponent) library package, transaction disabled	14220	7,032,349
COM Interop - .NET COM+ object (ServicedComponent) library package, transaction required	3404	2,938
COM Interop - .NET COM+ object (ServicedComponent) 1 server package, transaction disabled	13549	1,476
COM Interop - .NET COM+ object (ServicedComponent) server package, transaction required	10014	999

Remoting - local server, Serializable, HTTP	2233	179,131,214
Remoting - local server, Serializable, TCP	2233	179,131,214
Remoting - local server, MarshalByRef, HTTP	26968	148
Remoting - local server, MarshalByRef, TCP	4266	938
Remoting - remote server, Serializable, HTTP	3034	131,839,156
Remoting - remote server, Serializable, TCP	3084	129,701,686
Remoting - remote server, MarshalByRef, HTTP	12728	79
Remoting - remote server, MarshalByRef, TCP	4246	236

1 - When using COM+ package with "server" activation, the results between "transaction required" and "transaction disabled" are very similar. This must be due to the slowest part of the call is the server activation -- not the existence of transaction or not. See the difference between transaction attributes in the library activation setting a couple lines above.

2 - Why is this so much faster? Loading a class that is serializable from another AppDomain marshals the object over to the calling AppDomain, and should be the same speed as "local class". There must be something else going on here...