Performance issues with nested loops and string concatenations

Question

Can someone please explain why this code is taking so long to run (i.e. >24 hours): The number of rows is 5000, whilst the number of columns is 2000 (i.e. Approximately 10m loop

Answer 1

The reason that it takes so long to run is because you are using string concatenation to create a string. For each iteration it will copy the entire string to a new string, so in the end you will have copied strings that adds up to several million times the final string.

Use a StringBuilder to create the string:

StringBuilder textToWrite = new StringBuilder();
for (int i = 0; i < m.rows; i++)
{
    for (int j = 0; j < m.cols; j++)
    {
        if (j > 0) textToWrite.Append(',');
        textToWrite.Append(m[i, j]);
    }
    textToWrite.AppendLine();
}