Measuring Code Performance in C#

Performance is crucial in any software project. Especially in web applications supporting large-scale applications, where slow response times can lead to poor user experiences, it’s essential to measure and optimize the performance of critical methods. Also with the microservice architecture, even a small delay at a common feature can cause cascading delays across multiple components.

In this article, we go through two different ways to measure method performance in a C# Web API project. We will look at how to use the Stopwatch class and also leverage the MethodTimer.Fody library for more advanced scenarios.

Method Performance

Measuring method or functionality level performance is crucial for understanding where the time is being spent during the code execution. It allows developers to identify bottlenecks and improve response times in event flows, making applications more efficient and thus overall more responsive. We discussed here how to determine the performance impact of specific methods in your code.

I would like to point out that the techniques discussed here are particularly useful during the debugging and development stages of features. For production environments, there are more comprehensive tools that provide comprehensive details like distributed tracing and performance monitoring, such as Application Insights, NewRelic, Jaeger, or Zipkin. These tools provide end-to-end visibility into application performance across distributed systems.