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Strings are arrays of characters used to hold data like "Hi I am a string." A Stream is an i/o class that is used to read and write bytes of data as a continuous sequence of bytes. You can use streams to read and write data from/to files, among other things.
You would use the FileStream to read/write a file but a MemoryStream to read/write in-memory data, such as a byte array decoded from a string.
As the name suggests, a FileStream reads and writes to a file whereas a MemoryStream reads and writes to the memory. So it relates to where the stream is stored.
String just implements an indexer of type char internally and we can say that string is just equivalent to char[] type with lots of extra code to make it useful for you, hence, like an array, it is stored on heap always.
I need to pull large Unicode textual strings (e.g. 200Mb) from a Database (nvarchar) and store in memory for processing. i.e. I need random access to all parts of the strings.
Looking at this from strictly memory centric point of view, what are the pro’s and con’s of using a System.IO.MemoryStream versus a System.String as my in memory representation.
Some factors I am trying to research are:
I am looking for clarity and advice on these points, as well as any other memory considerations I have not thought of?
Note: There may be better way of processing these strings, but at this point I am realy just asking about the memory consideration of storing such an object.
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