Question

I have a list: Collection users which has around 100K+ records of users (all user objects fully loaded from the database with fields like Bio, First name, last name etc). This collection is fetched on application start from the database and is kept in memory.

Then I have code like:

User cachedUser = users.FirstOrDefault(x => string.Equals(x.UserName, username,
StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase));

Which I use to fetch users from this collection. But somehow I noticed that this operation is incredibly slow. Is there a performance issue while using Linq to query in memory collection of large objects? Should I instead call the DB each time I want to get a user?

Answer 1

If you want to optimize your response time and you could create a Dictionary<T,U> and search the user within:

    Dictionary<string, User> usersDictionary = new <Dictionary<string, User>(StringComparer.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase);

    // After querying the users from the DB add them to the dictionary             
    usersDictionary.Add(user.UserName, user);

    // Then when you need to retrieve a user
    User retrieveUser = null; 
    usersDictionary.TryGetValue(username, out retrieveUser);

Hope that helps !