Alternatives to String.Compare for performance

Question

I've used a profiler on my C# application and realised that String.Compare() is taking a lot of time overall: 43% of overall time with 124M hits

I'm comparing relatively small string: from 4 to 50 chars. What would you recommend to replace it with in terms of performance??

UPD: I only need to decide if 2 strings are the same or not. Strings can be zero or "". No cultural aspect or any other aspect to it. Most of the time it'll be "4578D" compared to "1235E" or similar.

Many thanks in advance!

Answer 1

It depends on what sort of comparison you want to make. If you only care about equality, then use one of the Equals overloads - for example, it's quicker to find that two strings have different lengths than to compare their contents.

If you're happy with an ordinal comparison, explicitly specify that:

int result = string.CompareOrdinal(x, y);

An ordinal comparison can be much faster than a culture-sensitive one.

Of course, that assumes that an ordinal comparison gives you the result you want - correctness is usually more important than performance (although not always).

EDIT: Okay, so you only want to test for equality. I'd just use the == operator, which uses an ordinal equality comparison.