Performance Impact of Using Spring.NET Dependency Injection

By Chris Bennett

Spring.NET provides Dependency Injection (DI)/Inversion of Control (IoC) as well as several other capabilities including Data, Messaging, etc. While DI provides a lot of flexibility, it comes at a cost. There is some added complexity; however, the real cost is performance.

To test the performance impact of Spring.NET DI, we need to create a series of interfaces and concrete classes that implement the interfaces. Then we will create two console apps to run the tests. The first console application will be a standard C# .NET console app without Spring.Net performing native functions. The second console application will perform the same set of functions, but using Spring.NET and DI. Within these two application we will add a series of timing functions to keep track of how long each tasks takes to run.

Interfaces

Starting off we need to create the interfaces we will need to use in the project as listed below:

  iSimpleMath
  
  public interface iSimpleMath 
  { 
     double Add(double a, double b); 
     double Subtract(double a, double b); 
  }
  
  iComplexMath
  
  public interface iComplexMath 
  { 
     double Multiply(double a, double b); 
     double Divide(double a, double b); 
  }
  
  iCalculate
  
  interface iCalculate 
  { 
     double Calculate(double starting); 
  }

These interfaces are extremely simple and the concrete classes are just as simple.

Concrete Classes

For these tests, we need to create a couple of interfaces/classes which we can use to judge the performance impact. Next we have the concrete classes used to implement the interfaces.

  ConcreteSimpleMath
  
  class ConcreteSimpleMath : Interfaces.iSimpleMath 
  { 
     public double Add(double a, double b) 
     { 
        return a + b; 
     } 
  
     public double Subtract(double a, double b) 
     { 
        return a - b; 
     } 
  }
  
  ConcreteComplexMath
  
  class ConcreteComplexMath : Interfaces.iComplexMath 
  { 
     public double Multiply(double a, double b) 
     { 
        return a * b; 
     } 
     
     public double Divide(double a, double b) 
     {
        return a / b; 
     } 
  } 
  
  
  ConcreteCalculate
  
  class ConcreteCalculate : Interfaces.iCalculate 
  { 
     private Interfaces.iSimpleMath simpleMath; 
     private Interfaces.iComplexMath complexMath; 
  
     public ConcreteCalculate(Interfaces.iSimpleMath sMath, Interfaces.iComplexMath cMath) 
     { 
        simpleMath = sMath; 
        complexMath = cMath; 
     } 
  
     public double Calculate(double starting) 
     { 
        starting = simpleMath.Add(starting, 15); 
        starting = complexMath.Multiply(starting, 30); 
        starting = simpleMath.Subtract(starting, 5); 
        starting = complexMath.Divide(starting, 2); 
        return starting; 
     } 
  }

The first two classes ConcreteSimpleMath and ConcreteComplexMath provide a simple implementation of the corresponding interface. The ConcreteCalculate class does implement the iCalculate interface, but it also a constructor accepting members for the iSimpleMath and iComplexMath interfaces. The Calculate method does perform 4 calls to the simple/complex math functions; however, the calls are not really important as the point is to perform a minimal amount of work.

Now that we have a series of class we can create the application. First we can create the native .NET application. as listed below to give us some base timing information of native .NET.

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