Question

Background:

I admit I did not attempt to benchmark this, but I’m curious…

What are the CPU/memory characteristics of the Enumerable.ToArray<T> (and its cousin Enumerable.ToList<T>)?

Since IEnumerable does not advertise in advance how many elements it has, I (perhaps naively) presume ToArray would have to “guess” an initial array size, and then to resize/reallocate the array if the first guess appears to be too small, then to resize it yet again if the second guess appears to be too small etc… Which would give worse-than-linear performance.

I can imagine better approaches involving (hybrid) lists, but this would still require more than one allocation (though not reallocation) and quite bit of copying, though it could be linear overall despite the overhead.

Question:

Is there any “magic” taking place behind the scenes, that avoids the need for this repetitive resizing, and makes ToArray linear in space and time?

More generally, is there an “official” documentation on BCL performance characteristics?

Answer 1

No magic. Resizing happens if required.

Note that it is not always required. If the IEnumerable<T> being .ToArrayed also implements ICollection<T>, then the .Count property is used to pre-allocate the array (making the algorithm linear in space and time.) If not, however, the following (rough) code is executed:

    foreach (TElement current in source)
    {
        if (array == null)
        {
            array = new TElement[4];
        }
        else
        {
            if (array.Length == num)
            {
                // Doubling happens *here*
                TElement[] array2 = new TElement[checked(num * 2)];
                Array.Copy(array, 0, array2, 0, num);
                array = array2;
            }
        }
        array[num] = current;
        num++;
    }

Note the doubling when the array fills.

Regardless, it’s generally a good practice to avoid calling .ToArray() and .ToList() unless you absolute require it. Interrogating the query directly when needed is often a better choice.