What is the cost of try/catch
time to read 3 min | 439 words

I recently got a question about the cost of try/catch, and whatever it was prohibitive enough to make you want to avoid using it.

That caused some head scratching on my part, until I got the following reply:

But, I’m still confused about the try/catch block not generating an overhead on the server.

Are you sure about it?

I learned that the try block pre-executes the code, and that’s why it causes a processing overhead.

Take a look here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973839.aspx#dotnetperftips_topic2

Maybe there is something that I don’t know? It is always possible, so I went and checked and found this piece:

Finding and designing away exception-heavy code can result in a decent perf win. Bear in mind that this has nothing to do with try/catch blocks: you only incur the cost when the actual exception is thrown. You can use as many try/catch blocks as you want. Using exceptions gratuitously is where you lose performance. For example, you should stay away from things like using exceptions for control flow.

Note that the emphasis is in the original. There is no cost to try/catch the only cost is when an exception is thrown, and that is regardless of whatever there is a try/catch around it or not.

Here is the proof: 

var startNew = Stopwatch.StartNew();
var mightBePi = Enumerable.Range(0, 100000000).Aggregate(0d, (tot, next) => tot + Math.Pow(-1d, next)/(2*next + 1)*4);
Console.WriteLine(startNew.ElapsedMilliseconds);

Which results in: 6015 ms of execution.

Wrapping the code in a try/catch resulted in: 

var startNew = Stopwatch.StartNew();
double mightBePi = Double.NaN;
try
{
    mightBePi = Enumerable.Range(0, 100000000).Aggregate(0d, (tot, next) => tot + Math.Pow(-1d, next)/(2*next + 1)*4);
}
catch (Exception e)
{
    Console.WriteLine(e);
}
Console.WriteLine(startNew.ElapsedMilliseconds);

And that run in 5999 ms.

Please note that the perf difference is pretty much meaningless (only 0.26% difference) and is well within the range of derivations for tests runs.

Tweet Share Share 24 comments
Tags: