Question

Which has better performance:

using (GADEEntities context = new GADEEntities(_connectionString))
{
   using (TransactionScope transaction = new TransactionScope())
   {
      AddToContext1(context);
      AddToContext2(context);
      AddToContext3(context);
      ...

      context.SaveChanges();

      transaction.Complete();
   }
}

or

using (GADEEntities context = new GADEEntities(_connectionString))
{
   using (TransactionScope transaction = new TransactionScope())
   {
      AddToContext1(context);
      context.SaveChanges();

      AddToContext2(context);
      context.SaveChanges();

      AddToContext3(context);
      context.SaveChanges();
      ...

      transaction.Complete();
   }
}

At any time, this could translate into 5000+ inserts into a DB on a clients machine. Is either way any different?

Answer 1

It’s very likely that your first version will be always faster, depending on what AddToContext exactly does. If your AddToContext method adds a single or only a few new objects to the context it will be definitely much faster. Calling SaveChanges after each insert (and probably also update and delete) slows the performance extremely down.

Here are a few measurements in a similar question:

Fastest Way of Inserting in Entity Framework