Specification Pattern and Performance

Question

I've been playing around w/ the specification pattern to handle and contain the business logic in our c#/mvc application. So far so good. I do have a question though - since we'll be creating a number of specification objects on the heap, will that affect performance in any way versus, say creating helper methods to handle the business logic? Thanks!

Answer 1

I do have a question though - since we'll be creating a number of specification objects on the heap, will that affect performance in any way versus, say creating helper methods to handle the business logic?

Of course it will affect performance, every line of code you write and design choice you makes affects performance in one way or another. This one is unlikely to be meaningful, be a bottleneck in your application or be worth caring about as this is almost surely a case of premature optimization. These days you should just focus on modeling your domain properly, and writing extremely clear and maintainable code. Focus more on developer productivity than on machine productivity. CPU cycles are cheap, and in nearly limitless supply. Developer cycles are not cheap, and are not limitless in supply.

But only you can know if it will impact the real-world use of your application on real-world data by profiling. We don't, and can't know, because we don't know your domain, don't know your users, don't know what performance you expect, etc. And even if we knew those things, we still couldn't give you as powerful of an answer as you can give yourself by dusting a profiler off the shelf and seeing what your application actually does.

Answer 2

since we'll be creating a number of specification objects on the heap, will that affect performance in any way

Most design patterns trade off some overhead for cleanliness of design - this is no exception. In general, the amount of memory that the specifications add is very minimal (typically a couple of references, and that's it). In addition, they tend to add a couple of extra method calls vs. custom logic.

That being said, I would not try to prematurely optimize this. The overhead here is incredibly small, so I would highly doubt it would be noticeable in any real world application.