Fastest way to fill a matrix with Random bytes

Question

I want to fill an array with random values. The code I wrote is this one:

public class PersonalityMap
{
    const int size = 16;
    byte[,] fullMap = new byte[size, size];

    /// <summary>
    /// Generates a random map
    /// </summary>
    public PersonalityMap()
    {
        Random random = new Random();
        byte[] row = new byte[size];
        for (int i = 0; i < size; i++)
        {
            random.NextBytes(row);
            for (int j = 0; j < size; j++)
                fullMap[i, j] = row[j];
        }
    }
}

But I feel there's a way to do it faster.

Answer 1

Well, you could create one single-dimensional array, fill that, and then copy it with Buffer.BlockCopy:

Random random = new Random();
byte[] row = new byte[size * size];
random.NextBytes(row);
Buffer.BlockCopy(row, 0, fullMap, 0, size * size);

However, before you try to optimize even further - just how quick do you need this to be? Have you benchmarked your application and determined that this is the bottleneck of your application?