Performance of delegate and method group

Question

I was investigating the performance hit of creating Cachedependency objects, so I wrote a very simple test program as follows:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Web.Caching;

namespace Test
{
    internal class Program
    {
        private static readonly string[] keys = new[] {"Abc"};
        private static readonly int MaxIteration = 10000000;

        private static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Debug.Print("first set");
            test2();
            test3();
            test4();
            test5();
            test6();
            test7();
            Debug.Print("second set");
            test7();
            test6();
            test5();
            test4();
            test3();
            test2();
        }

        private static void test2()
        {
            DateTime start = DateTime.Now;
            var list = new List<CacheDependency>();
            for (int i = 0; i < MaxIteration; i++)
            {
                list.Add(new CacheDependency(null, keys));
            }

            Debug.Print("test2 Time: " + (DateTime.Now - start));
        }

        private static void test3()
        {
            DateTime start = DateTime.Now;
            var list = new List<Func<CacheDependency>>();
            for (int i = 0; i < MaxIteration; i++)
            {
                list.Add(() => new CacheDependency(null, keys));
            }

            Debug.Print("test3 Time: " + (DateTime.Now - start));
        }

        private static void test4()
        {
            var p = new Program();
            DateTime start = DateTime.Now;
            var list = new List<Func<CacheDependency>>();
            for (int i = 0; i < MaxIteration; i++)
            {
                list.Add(p.GetDep);
            }

            Debug.Print("test4 Time: " + (DateTime.Now - start));
        }

        private static void test5()
        {
            var p = new Program();
            DateTime start = DateTime.Now;
            var list = new List<Func<CacheDependency>>();
            for (int i = 0; i < MaxIteration; i++)
            {
                list.Add(() => { return p.GetDep(); });
            }

            Debug.Print("test5 Time: " + (DateTime.Now - start));
        }

        private static void test6()
        {
            DateTime start = DateTime.Now;
            var list = new List<Func<CacheDependency>>();
            for (int i = 0; i < MaxIteration; i++)
            {
                list.Add(GetDepStatic);
            }

            Debug.Print("test6 Time: " + (DateTime.Now - start));
        }

        private static void test7()
        {
            DateTime start = DateTime.Now;
            var list = new List<Func<CacheDependency>>();
            for (int i = 0; i < MaxIteration; i++)
            {
                list.Add(() => { return GetDepStatic(); });
            }

            Debug.Print("test7 Time: " + (DateTime.Now - start));
        }

        private CacheDependency GetDep()
        {
            return new CacheDependency(null, keys);
        }

        private static CacheDependency GetDepStatic()
        {
            return new CacheDependency(null, keys);
        }
    }
}

But I can't understand why these result looks like this:

first set
test2 Time: 00:00:08.5394884
test3 Time: 00:00:00.1820105
test4 Time: 00:00:03.1401796
test5 Time: 00:00:00.1910109
test6 Time: 00:00:02.2041261
test7 Time: 00:00:00.4840277
second set
test7 Time: 00:00:00.1850106
test6 Time: 00:00:03.2941884
test5 Time: 00:00:00.1750100
test4 Time: 00:00:02.3561347
test3 Time: 00:00:00.1830105
test2 Time: 00:00:07.7324423

In particular:

1. Why is test4 and test6 much slower than their delegate version? I also noticed that Resharper specifically has a comment on the delegate version suggesting change test5 and test7 to "Convert to method group". Which is the same as test4 and test6 but they're actually slower?
2. I don't seem a consistent performance difference when calling test4 and test6, shouldn't static calls to be always faster?

Answer 1

In tests with method group (4,6) C# compiler doesn't cache delegate (Func) object. It creates new every time. In 7 and 5 it caches Action object to generated method that calls your methods. So creation of Funcs from method groups is very slow (coz of Heap allocation), but calling is fast as action points directly on you method. And creation of actions from lambdas is fast as Func is cached but it points to generated method so there is one unnecessary method call.

Beware that not all lambdas can be cached (closures break this logic)