I’m working on upgrading an existing .NET 5.0 application to .NET 6.0. Although the general claim is that .NET 6.0 is (a lot) faster than .NET 5.0, I like to verify if this is correct for my use cases. I have some performance critical code in this application and I have to be sure that performance remains at last on par (and preferably gets better) after the upgrade.
Let's write some micro benchmarks using benchmarkdotnet.
Compare framework versions
I don’t want to make this a full benchmarkdotnet tutorial. If you are new to the library, check out the Getting Started section in the documentation. Let us focus on how we can run a benchmark against multiple framework version.
First thing that is important to do is that our benchmark application (a .NET Core console application) should target all the frameworks we want to test. Therefore update the TargetFrameworks property:
Now we need to update our Program.cs file to call the BenchmarkSwitcher:
Based on the command line parameters we provide,BenchmarkDotNet will generate, builds and executes a new console app per every benchmark using different framework versions.
To run the benchmark comparing performance on .NET 5 and .NET 6, you should execute the following command:
dotnet run -c Release -f net5.0 --runtimes net5.0 net6.0This will build the benchmarks application in release configuration targeting the .NET 5 surface area, and then run all of the benchmarks on both .NET 5 and .NET 6.
More information: https://benchmarkdotnet.org/articles/configs/toolchains.html