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Is there any difference regarding performance of private, protected, public and internal methods in C# class? I'm interested if one consumes more processor time or RAM.
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public - can be access by anyone anywhere. private - can only be accessed from with in the class it is a part of. protected - can only be accessed from with in the class or any object that inherits off of the class. Nothing is like null but in VB.
A public method can be invoked from anywhere—there are no restrictions on its use. A private method is internal to the implementation of a class, and it can only be called by other instance methods of the class (or, as we'll see later, its subclasses).
internal is useful when you want to declare a member or type inside a DLL, not outside that. Normally, when you declare a member as public , you can access that from other DLLs. But, if you need to declare something to be public just inside your class library, you can declare it as internal .
internal is an alternative to Java's package-private. internal means that the declarations are visible inside a module. internal provides real encapsulation for the implementation details, while in Java's package-private encapsulation could be broken.
I'm not aware of any performance difference for normal invocation; it's possible that more restricted access will take a little more work when accessing via dynamic invocation or reflection as the caller may need to be validated more carefully. In the normal JIT-compiled case the access can be validated by the CLR just once and then taken for granted. I guess it's possible that the JIT compilation (and IL verification) itself could be slightly slower for more restrictive access - but I find it hard to believe it would be significant.
This should absolutely not be a factor in determining which accessibility to use, even if somehow there is some tiny performance difference I'm unaware of. If you believe you may be able to achieve a performance benefit by making the accessibility something other than the "natural" one for your design, you should definitely benchmark the before/after case - I suspect you'll be hard-pressed to find a real-world situation where the difference is reliably measurable.
The same sort of advice goes for all kinds of micro-optimization: it's almost never a good idea anyway, and should definitely only be undertaken within careful measuring.
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