I was curios how expensive is a cross domain operation so I have made a test.

The test procedure is simple. Perform a number of cross-domain and non cross-domain operations (get the value of NextNumber() from same domain and from another domain) and measure the time elapsed. For each value I have runned the application 3 times, recorded the time (in milliseconds) and created the mean of this three.

For this I’ve created a Console Application containing two classes, the main class and “NumberClass” which has a method that returns the next long. The code for this two is below:

NumberClass:

//MarshalByRefObject is used because this object will cross domain boundary
class NumberClass:MarshalByRefObject
{
    public ulong number = 0;
    public ulong NextNumber()
    {
        return number++;
    }
}

The Main method from the main class:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    //Uncomment this two lines to load the class in another app domain
    //System.AppDomain appDom = System.AppDomain.CreateDomain("TestAppDomain");
    //NumberClass n = (NumberClass)appDom.CreateInstanceAndUnwrap("AppDomain", "AppDomain.NumberClass");
    NumberClass n = new NumberClass(); //Comment this line if uncomment the two above
    DateTime start = DateTime.Now;
    //We are going to change the value of i 
    for (ulong i = 0; i < 10; i++)
    {
        n.NextNumber();
    }
    DateTime end = DateTime.Now;
    TimeSpan elapsedTime = end - start;
    Console.WriteLine("Elapsed time: {0} ms", elapsedTime.TotalMilliseconds);
    Console.ReadLine();
}

The values of i are: 1, 10, 100, 1.000, 10.000, 100.000, 1.000.000 so a total of 42 measurements were performed. The test system is a Core2Duo 2Ghz, 2GB Ram 667 running Windows Vista Business x32 and Visual Studio 2008 Professional.

Let’s see the results:

Please note that the tallest bar from the left graph is almost the smallest from the right one :)

Conclusion: using AppDomains is cool, is useful but use them wisely because a large number of cross domain operations drastically affect performances.