This ended up being a pretty obvious, in retrospect. We noticed in the profiler that we spent a lot of time working with headers. Now, RavenDB is using REST as the communication layer, so it is doing a lot with that, but we should be able to do better.

Then Tal dug into the actual implementation and found:

public string GetHeader(string key)
{
	if (InnerHeaders.Contains(key) == false)
		return null;
	return InnerHeaders.GetValues(key).FirstOrDefault();
}

public List<string> GetHeaders(string key)
{
	if (InnerHeaders.Contains(key) == false)
		return null;
	return InnerHeaders.GetValues(key).ToList();
}


public HttpHeaders InnerHeaders
{
	get
	{
		var headers = new Headers();
		foreach (var header in InnerRequest.Headers)
		{
			if (header.Value.Count() == 1)
				headers.Add(header.Key, header.Value.First());
			else
				headers.Add(header.Key, header.Value.ToList());
		}

		if (InnerRequest.Content == null)
			return headers;

		foreach (var header in InnerRequest.Content.Headers)
		{
			if (header.Value.Count() == 1)
				headers.Add(header.Key, header.Value.First());
			else
				headers.Add(header.Key, header.Value.ToList());
		}

		return headers;
	}
}

To be fair, this implementation was created very early on, and no one ever actually spent any time looking it since (why would they? it worked, and quite well). The problem is the number of copies that we have, and the fact that to pull a since header, we have to copy all the headers, sometimes multiple times. We replaced this with code that wasn’t doing stupid stuff, and we couldn’t even find the cost of working with headers in the profiler any longer.

But that brings up a really interesting question. How could we not know about this sort of thing? I mean, this isn’t the first time that we are doing a performance pass on the system. So how come we missed this?

The answer is that in this performance pass, we are doing something different. Usually we perf-test RavenDB as you would when using it on your own systems. But for the purpose of this suite of tests, and in order to find more stuff that we can optimize, we are actually working with a stripped down client, no caching, no attempt to optimize things across the entire board. In fact, we have put RavenDB in the worst possible situation, all new work, and no chance to do any sort of optimizations, then we start seeing how all of those code paths that were rarely hit started to light up quite nicely.