Fastest way of reading and writing binary

Question

I\'m currently optimizing an application, one of the operations that is done very often is reading and writing binary. I need 2 types of functions:

Set(byte[] ta         


        

Answer 1

You should do some profiling on your code to reveal whether this is the bottleneck. Also looking at your code it appears that you are using .Net function calls to write one byte to an unmanaged array, involving a pin on the memory and a call to unsafe code...

You might be much better off declaring a .Net System.IO.MemoryStream and seeking and writing around to it, wherever possible using a stream writer to push your changes in, which should use less function calls and won't require unsafe code. You'll find the pointer stuff much more useful in C# if you are doing things like DSP, where you need to perform a single operation to every value in an array etc.

EDIT: Let me also mention that depending on what you are doing you might find that the CPU caching will come into effect, if you can keep working on a single small area of memory that fits into the cache then you will end up with the best performance.