Chinh's semi-random thoughts on software development, gadgets, and other things.

How often have you been told to use StringBuilder to concatenate strings in .NET? My guess is often enough. Here is something you may not know about string concatenation: StringBuilder is not always faster. There are already many articles out there that explain the why’s, I am not going to do that here. But I do have some test data for you.

When concatenating three values or less, traditional concatenation is faster (by a very small margin)

This block of code took 1484 milliseconds to run on my PC:

for (int i = 0; i <= 1000000; i++) 
{ 
    // Concat strings 3 times using StringBuilder 
    StringBuilder s = new StringBuilder(); 
    s.Append(i.ToString()); 
    s.Append(i.ToString()); 
    s.Append(i.ToString()); 
}

And this one, using traditional concatenation, took slightly less time (1344 milliseconds):

for (int i = 0; i <= 1000000; i++) 
{ 
    // Concat strings 3 times using traditional concatenation 
    string s = i.ToString(); 
    s = s + i.ToString(); 
    s = s + i.ToString(); 
}

The above data suggests that StringBuilder only starts to work faster once the number of concatenations exceed 3.

Building strings from literals

When building a large string from several string literals (such as building a SQL block, or a client side javascript block), use neither traditional concatenation nor StringBuilder. Instead, choose one of the methods below:

+ operator

// Build script block 
string s = "<script>" 
       + "function test() {" 
       + "  alert('this is a test');" 
       + "  return 0;" 
       + "}";

The compiler concatenates that at compile time. At run-time, that works as fast as a big string literal.

@ string literal

I sometimes use the @ string literal which allows for newlines (I find this syntax is harder to maintain, formatting-wise, than using the + operator):

string s = @"<script> 
        function test() { 
        alert('this is a test'); 
        return 0; 
        }";

Both methods above run about 40 times faster than using StringBuilder or traditional string concatenation.

Rules of Thumb

• When concatenating three dynamic string values or less, use traditional string concatenation.
• When concatenating more than three dynamic string values, use StringBuilder.
• When building a big string from several string literals, use either the @ string literal or the inline + operator.

Updated 2007-09-29

I have posted a follow-up article to provide more detailed analysis and to answer some of the questions asked by readers.