The cost of an exception is about 6ms !

I have read quite a few times that exceptions were slow. I came to wonder about how slow they actually were? Is that big enough to care about it ? After all, hardware is pretty fast nowdays, isn't it?

Well it turns out that throwing and catching an exception takes about 6ms on my machine (Core Duo, 2ghz)

I you want to know why it takes 6ms, have a look at this fantastic post :)

Now, a few milliseconds, it does not look like a long time, but think about a web server, handling hundreds of requests at the same time. If each request uses a few Int.Parse that fails(or whatever code that may throw exceptions) , that could end up being quite significant.

This is a simplified version of the code I used (removed the loop to get an average value):

private void Execute()
{
    Stopwatch sw = new Stopwatch();
    sw.Start();

    ThrowAndCatchException();

    sw.Stop();

    Console.WriteLine("Time taken: {0}ms", sw.ElapsedMilliseconds);
}

private void ThrowAndCatchException()
{
    try
    {
        throw new Exception();
    }
    catch (Exception) { }
    {
    }
}

Visual Studio has also an hexadecimal editor !

Have you ever wondered if visual studio can hex edit files ? Well it's actually possible but not very intuitive...

Go to File -> Open -> file
Select the file that you want to open, the Open button state will change to enable
Click the small drop down list at the right of the Open button and select Open With

You will get a list of additional editors, choose Binary Editor :)