Question

I am having an issue with the performance of a LINQ query and so I created a small simplified example to demonstrate the issue below. The code takes a random list of small integers and returns the list partitioned into several smaller lists each which totals 10 or less.

The problem is that (as I’ve written this) the code takes exponentially longer with N. This is only an O(N) problem. With N=2500, the code takes over 10 seconds to run on my pc.

I would appriciate greatly if someone could explain what is going on. Thanks, Mark.

int N = 250;
Random r = new Random();
var work = Enumerable.Range(1,N).Select(x => r.Next(0, 6)).ToList();
var chunks = new List<List<int>>();

// work.Dump("All the work.");  // LINQPad Print
var workEnumerable = work.AsEnumerable();

Stopwatch sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();
while(workEnumerable.Any())  // or .FirstorDefault() != null
{
    int soFar = 0;
    var chunk = workEnumerable.TakeWhile( x => 
                          {
                              soFar += x;               
                              return  (soFar <= 10);
                          }).ToList();
    chunks.Add(chunk);          // Commented out makes no difference.
    workEnumerable = workEnumerable.Skip(chunk.Count); // <== SUSPECT
}
sw.Stop();

// chunks.Dump("Work Chunks.");   // LINQPad Print
sw.Elapsed.Dump("Time elapsed.");

Answer 1

What .Skip() does is create a new IEnumerable that loops over the source, and only begins yielding results after the first N elements. You chain who knows how many of these after each other. Everytime you call .Any(), you need to loop over all the previously skipped elements again.

Generally speaking, it’s a bad idea to set up very complicated operator chains in LINQ and enumerating them repeatedly. Also, since LINQ is a querying API, methods like Skip() are a bad choice when what you’re trying to achieve amounts to modifying a data structure.