Not all objects are created equals
time to read 1 min | 126 words

I found something extremely surprising while profiling a project. Take a look at this piece of code:

Stopwatch stop = Stopwatch.StartNew();
for (int i = 0; i < 1000000; i++)
{
	new WeakReference(null);
}
stop.Stop();
Console.WriteLine("WeakRef: " + stop.ElapsedMilliseconds);

stop = Stopwatch.StartNew();
for (int i = 0; i < 1000000; i++)
{
	new string('a', 5);
}
stop.Stop();
Console.WriteLine("'aaaaa': " + stop.ElapsedMilliseconds);

On my machine, this has the following output:

WeakRef: 980
'aaaaa': 35

Creating a WeakReference is much more costly than creating a normal object. Not surprising, when you think of it, WeakReference has deep ties to the CLR, but I couldn't really believe it when I saw it the first time.

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