Benchmarking .NET: Try-Catch vs. TryParse

Inspired by Scott Hanselman article about careful exception handling I decided to investigate the price of catching cast errors. For comparison I chose a TryParse method, which was implemented by .NET 2.0 in all basic types instead of just double in version 1.1.

I wrote small test runner (and practiced generics and delegates along the way). The following two methods were tested:

private static void ConvertTo_Integer__TryParse(string input)
{
 int result;
 bool success;
 success = Int32.TryParse(input, out result);
}

private static void ConvertTo_Integer__TryCatch(string input)
{
 int result;
 bool success;
 try
 {
   result=Int32.Parse(input);
 }
 catch
 {
   success = false;
 }
}

Successful operations at no surprise are pretty fast and equal in performance. But in the failure case the traditional try-catch handling is more pricey.

What would happen if there are more operations, like – 1000 of them? Difference is more visible:

In database-related applications a 1000 parse operations in a row are very common. While DateTime.Parse seems to be capable of better performance than Convert.ToDateTime (as latter uses Parse deep inside), the price of a try-catch eats the advantages anyway.

Those are result for Integer and DateTime parsing as a graph: