Question

I have a C# application..I continuously get a null reference exception..I manage to catch this exception and log it..But i doubt if this exception will affect the performance of my application..Please note that i am not trying to avoid the exception instead i need to know if this exception affects the performance of my application if it is continuously fired .

Answer 1

If you’re getting a NullReferenceException, you should fix it rather than catching it. You should only ever catch it if it occurs in code in a way that you cannot fix (e.g. a broken third party library). A NullReferenceException always indicates a programming error somewhere.

As for performance – it depends on what you mean by “continuously”. Exceptions can be horribly expensive if they’re thrown when nothing’s really wrong – they’re fine when used properly. How many are you seeing per second, for example? Note that when running in a debugger, exceptions are often much more expensive than they would be when a debugger isn’t attached.

As ever, when you’re worried about performance, you should test the performance, so you can use hard data to make decisions.