DateTime parsing performance
30.July.08 – 11:10In one of my current projects i have to convert a lot of strings to DateTime structures. Sometimes tens of thousands datetime-string arrive at the service per second. As performance is an issue in this project, i was looking for the most performant way to do all the stuff. that’s why i put on a little test to evaluate performance of the different DateTime parsing methods.
Our 4 candidates are :
- DateTime.Parse
- DateTime.ParseExact
- DateTime.TryParse
- DateTime.TryParseExact
I also wanted to know if there is a difference when using different IFormatProviders. To benchmark i used the InvariantCulture, a concrete CultureInfo (”de-DE” in this case as i could not see any difference between “de-DE”,”en-US”,”fr-FR”,…) and no IFormatProvider for the Parse/TryParse methods (having an IFormatProvider is mandatory for the ***Exact methods).
The following chart shows the result for 10.000.000 calls to every one of those methods.
I was kinda surprised that TryParse was not faster than Parse. But overall the results showed what i expected. TryParseExact is by far the fastest of them all. So , if you care about performance and have to parse a lot of strings into a DateTime structure, use TryParseExact().
Comments are welcome!
Edit:I was pointed out to the System.Convert.ToDateTime() Method, but as it uses DateTime.Parse() internally, performance is the same as DateTime.Parse(), so TryParseExact is still the way to go.
