Ternary ? operator vs the conventional If-else operator in c# [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Is the conditional operator slow?

I'm a massive user of the ? operator in C#. However my project manager frequently warns me that using ? operator might cost some performance compared to the If-Else statements in a large scale application. So I'm told to avoid using it. However, I love using it because it is concise and sort of keeps the code clean.

Is there such performance overhead when using ? operator?

Answer 1

I ran 100 million Ternary Operators and 100 million If-Else statements and recorded the performance of each. Here is the code:

Stopwatch s = new Stopwatch(); // System.Diagnostics Stopwatch int test = 0; s.Start(); for(int a = 0; a < 100000000; a++)     test = a % 50 == 0 ? 1 : 2; s.Stop();  s.Restart(); for(int b = 0; b < 100000000; b++) {     if(b % 50 == 0)         test = 1;     else         test = 2;  } s.Stop(); 

Here is the results (ran on an Intel Atom 1.66ghz with 1gb ram and I know, it sucks):

• Ternary Operator: 5986 milliseconds or 0.00000005986 seconds per each operator.

• If-Else: 5667 milliseconds or 0.00000005667 seconds per each statement.

Don't forget that I ran 100 million of them, and I don't think 0.00000000319 seconds difference between the two matters that much.

Answer 2

No.

Use what makes your code readable. If if statements do that, use them. If ternary operators do that, use them.

It is likely that both will compile down to the same IL anyway.

In any event the things that will slow down your application will likely be the database or the network or the hard drive ... anything except whether you used if statements or ternary expressions.