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How costly is .NET reflection?
I am currently in a programming mentality that reflection is my best friend. I use it a lot for dynamic loading of content that allows ‘loose implementation’ rather than strict interfaces, as well as a lot of custom attributes.
What is the ‘real’ cost to using reflection?
Is it worth the effort for frequently reflected types to have cached reflection, such as our own pre-LINQ DAL object code on all the properties to table definitions?
Would the caching memory footprint outwieght the reflection CPU usage?
Reflection requires a large amount of the type metadata to be loaded and then processed. This can result in a larger memory overhead and slower execution. According to this article property modification is about 2.5x-3x slower and method invocation is 3.5x-4x slower.
Here is an excellent MSDN article outlining how to make reflection faster and where the overhead is. I highly recommend reading if you want to learn more.
There is also an element of complexity that reflection can add to the code that makes it substantially more confusing and hence difficult to work with. Some people, like Scott Hanselman believe that by using reflection you often make more problems than you solve. This is especially the case if your teams is mostly junior devs.
You may be better off looking into the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) if you need alot of dynamic behaviour. With the new changes coming in .NET 4.0 you may want to see if you can incorporate some of it into your solution. The added support for dynamic from VB and C# make using dynamic code very elegant and creating your own dynamic objects fairly straight forward.
Good luck.
EDIT: I did some more poking around Scott’s site and found this podcast on reflection. I have not listened to it but it might be worth while.