.NET BCL collections performance

Sometimes there is need to understand how the .NET BCL collection classes performs. This can help to choose proper collection for a solution. Bellow you can find the performance measurement and the BCL collections lookup and manipulation efficiency analyses. In the C#/.NET Fundamentals: Choosing the Right Collection Class blogpost you can find additional details.

Performance measurement

Each collection were accessed 3 times: at the begin of a collection, at the middle, at the end. Size is the number of elements in the collection. Tests were run for 1.000.000 times and total time measured in milliseconds.

Results

Name	Size	Begin	Middle	End
ConcurrentDictionary	1000	440	441	432
ConcurrentDictionary	10000	445	451	448
ConcurrentDictionary	100000	458	485	486
ConcurrentDictionary	1000000	483	483	457
Dictionary	1000	431	432	422
Dictionary	10000	438	440	432
Dictionary	100000	427	449	448
Dictionary	1000000	436	454	451
HashSet	1000	433	437	424
HashSet	10000	446	446	424
HashSet	100000	431	457	442
HashSet	1000000	440	475	439
Hashtable	1000	434	442	445
Hashtable	10000	436	443	460
Hashtable	100000	448	455	481
Hashtable	1000000	450	519	563
List	1000	491	8327	17340
List	10000	673	79260	169412
List	100000	5038	868709	1815954
List	1000000	7249	8570125	18169534
NameValueCollection	1000	1401	1413	1408
NameValueCollection	10000	1406	1441	1438
NameValueCollection	100000	1417	1473	1527
NameValueCollection	1000000	1460	1525	1607
SortedDictionary	1000	1703	1751	2290
SortedDictionary	10000	2124	2348	3443
SortedDictionary	100000	2542	2530	4068
SortedDictionary	1000000	3160	3266	4548
SortedList	1000	1699	1594	1857
SortedList	10000	2233	2290	2428
SortedList	100000	2645	2871	2870
SortedList	1000000	3042	3164	3336
SortedSet	1000	1645	1688	2205
SortedSet	10000	2060	2287	3327
SortedSet	100000	2476	2409	3945
SortedSet	1000000	3042	3139	4368