Entity Framework 6 DbSet AddRange vs IDbSet Add - How Can AddRange be so much faster?

Question

I was playing around with Entity Framework 6 on my home computer and decided to try out inserting a fairly large amount of rows, around 430k.

My first try looked li

Answer 1

As Jakub answered, calling SaveChanges after every added entity was not helping. But you would still get some performance problems even if you move it out. That will not fix the performance issue caused by the Add method.

Add vs AddRange

That's a very common error to use the Add method to add multiple entities. In fact, it's the DetectChanges method that's INSANELY slow.

• The Add method DetectChanges after every record added.
• The AddRange method DetectChanges after all records are added.

See: Entity Framework - Performance Add

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It is perhaps not SqlBulkCopy fast, but it is still a huge improvement

It's possible to get performance VERY close to SqlBulkCopy.

Disclaimer: I'm the owner of the project Entity Framework Extensions

(This library is NOT free)

This library can make your code more efficient by allowing you to save multiples entities at once. All bulk operations are supported:

• BulkSaveChanges
• BulkInsert
• BulkUpdate
• BulkDelete
• BulkMerge
• BulkSynchronize

Example:

// Easy to use
context.BulkSaveChanges();

// Easy to customize
context.BulkSaveChanges(bulk => bulk.BatchSize = 100);

// Perform Bulk Operations
context.BulkDelete(customers);
context.BulkInsert(customers);
context.BulkUpdate(customers);

// Customize Primary Key
context.BulkMerge(customers, operation => {
   operation.ColumnPrimaryKeyExpression = 
        customer => customer.Code;
});