Question

I am trying to optimize a piece of code that clones an object:

#region ICloneable
public object Clone()
{
    MemoryStream buffer = new MemoryStream();
    BinaryFormatter formatter = new BinaryFormatter();

    formatter.Serialize(buffer, this);     // takes 3.2 seconds
    buffer.Position = 0;
    return formatter.Deserialize(buffer);  // takes 2.1 seconds
}
#endregion

Pretty standard stuff. The problem is that the object is pretty beefy and it takes 5.4 seconds (according ANTS Profiler – I am sure there is the profiler overhead, but still).

Is there a better and faster way to clone?

Answer 1

1. Don’t implement ICloneable.

2. The fast way to clone an object is to create a new instance of the same type and copy/clone all fields from the original instance to the new instance. Don’t try to come up with a “generic” clone method that can clone any object of any class.

Example:

class Person
{
    private string firstname;
    private string lastname;
    private int age;

    public Person(string firstname, string lastname, int age)
    {
        this.firstname = firstname;
        this.lastname = lastname;
        this.age = age;
    }

    public Person Clone()
    {
        return new Person(this.firstname, this.lastname, this.age);
    }
}