Here's a demonstration and benchmark test I did on allocating to the stack vs. allocating on the heap. I combined both allocation and retrieval into each method for each allocation destination, and the results are below.
Note: There are benefits of each, although for speed, allocation on the stack is much faster if you need that for performance. The downside is that the heap is a much larger block of space than the stack, which is usually limited. Therefore, you can get a stack overflow exception if you try to push too much to the stack before it's pop'd off.
Upon declaration to the stack, for instance, this line:
Will actually measure how much space we need to allocate 100000 signed 32 bit integer values on the stack, which is 4 bytes * 100000 = 400000bytes.
Note: There are benefits of each, although for speed, allocation on the stack is much faster if you need that for performance. The downside is that the heap is a much larger block of space than the stack, which is usually limited. Therefore, you can get a stack overflow exception if you try to push too much to the stack before it's pop'd off.
Upon declaration to the stack, for instance, this line:
Code:
int* i = stackalloc int[100000];Will actually measure how much space we need to allocate 100000 signed 32 bit integer values on the stack, which is 4 bytes * 100000 = 400000bytes.
Code:
private unsafe void Method1()
{
int tmp;
int* i = stackalloc int[100000];
for (int n = 0; n < 100000; n++)
i[n] = 0;
for (int x = 0; x < 100000; x++) tmp = i[x];
}
private unsafe void Method2()
{
int tmp;
int[] i = new int[100000];
for (int n = 0; n < 100000; n++)
i[n] = 0;
for (int x = 0; x < 100000; x++) tmp = i[x];
}
