Why does the second for loop always execute faster than the first one?

Question

I was trying to figure out if a for loop was faster than a foreach loop and was using the System.Diagnostics classes to time the task. While running the test I noticed that

Answer 1

I was just performing tests to get some real numbers, but in the meantime Gaz beat me to the answer - the call to Console.Writeline is jitted at the first call, so you pay that cost in the first loop.

Just for information though - using a stopwatch rather than the datetime and measuring number of ticks:

Without a call to Console.Writeline before the first loop the times were

for: 16802
foreach: 2282

with a call to Console.Writeline they were

for: 2729
foreach: 2268

Though these results were not consistently repeatable because of the limited number of runs, but the magnitude of difference was always roughly the same.

---

The edited code for reference:

        int[] x = new int[] { 3, 6, 9, 12 };
        int[] y = new int[] { 3, 6, 9, 12 };

        Console.WriteLine("Hello World");

        Stopwatch sw = new Stopwatch();

        sw.Start();
        for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(x[i]);
        }
        sw.Stop();
        long elapsedTime = sw.ElapsedTicks;

        sw.Reset();
        sw.Start();
        foreach (var item in y)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(item);
        }
        sw.Stop();
        long elapsedTime2 = sw.ElapsedTicks;

        Console.WriteLine("\nSummary");
        Console.WriteLine("--------------------------\n");
        Console.WriteLine("for:\t{0}\nforeach:\t{1}", elapsedTime, elapsedTime2);

        Console.ReadKey();