IoC Container Benchmark Performance comparison

Announcements

This arctile is posted by Daniel Palme, who is a .NET consultant from Germany.I found it in his blog,and it's very helpful to me. So I decide to post it in my cnblogs. As it is so simple, as well as I've been used to read English articles. So I decided not to translate it into Chinese to keep the original meaning. You can click this link to access the original.

In this post I will do a performance comparison of the most popular IoC containers.
Of course performance is not the only criteria when choosing a container for a project. Perhaps you need features like interception , then not all containers are suited. But if the container is "only" used for wiring up dependencies, why not choose the fastest one?

The test setup

The contestants

• AutoFac
• Caliburn.Micro
• Catel
• Dynamo.Ioc
• Funq
• Griffin
• Hiro
• LightCore
• LightInject
• LinFu
• MEF
• MicroSliver
• Mugen
• Munq
• Ninject
• Petite
• Simple Injector
• Speedioc
• Spring.NET
• StructureMap
• TinyIoc
• Unity
• Windsor

You probably have heard of most of the frameworks, but one of them is quite new and works differently:  Hiro The author, Philip Laureano, names it an "inversion of control container compiler framework". After configuration, the container gets compiled and is immutable from now on. This concept makes this container really fast.

The test setup

To test the performance I register three interfaces and their corresponding implementation to every container. The first one is registered as a singleton, the second one as transient (a new instance is created every time). The third also has a transient lifetime, but moreover has a dependency to the first two interfaces (which get injected by constructor injection).

Every interface is resolved 1.000.000 times and the time is measured in milliseconds.

The results

Overview

Container	Singleton	Transient	Combined	Interception
No	132	81	63
AutoFac 3.0.2	749	1806	4570	33765
Caliburn.Micro 1.5.1	194	226	651
Catel 3.5	258	952	2846
Dynamo 3.0.1.0	72	84	139
Funq 1.0.0.0	81	92	277
Griffin 1.1.0	194	195	481
Hiro 1.0.3	101	103	107
LightCore 1.5.1	156	2343	12045
LightInject 3.0.0.5	171	178	298
LinFu 2.3.0.41559	2876	17564	47712
Mef 4.0.0.0	2507	8724	24937
MicroSliver 2.1.6.0	150	485	2019
Mugen 3.5.1	302	483	1404
Munq 3.1.6	102	131	412
Ninject 3.0.1.10	6791	19314	54926
Petite 0.3.2	86	86	260
SimpleInjector 2.2.3	68	87	101	467
Speedioc 0.1.33	96	109	94
Spring.NET 1.3.2	672	14560	39065	666
StructureMap 2.6.4.1	1127	1213	4379	7329
TinyIOC 1.2	246	1500	6098
Unity 3.0.1304.0	2451	3807	11212	103682
Windsor 3.2.0	456	2422	6970	16677

 Singleton

Transient

Combined

Feature comparison

	Performance	Configuration			Features			Environment
Container		Code	XML	Auto	Autowiring	Custom lifetimes	Interception	.NET	SL	WP7	WinRT
AutoFac	Average	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Caliburn.Micro	Average	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Catel	Average	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Dynamo	Fast	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No
Funq	Fast	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Griffin	Fast	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Hiro	Fast	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No	No
LightCore	Average	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
LightInject	Fast	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
LinFu	Slow	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
MEF	Slow	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
MicroSliver	Average	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Mugen	Average	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Munq	Fast	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes	No
Ninject	Slow	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Petite	Fast	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No
SimpleInjector	Fast	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Speedioc	Fast	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No
Spring.NET	Very slow	No	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
StructureMap	Average	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No
TinyIoc	Average	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Unity	Average	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Windsor	Average	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No

Conclusion

Ninject is definitely the slowest container.

MEF, LinFu and Spring.NET are faster than Ninject, but still pretty slow. AutoFac, Catel and Windsor come next, followed by StructureMap, Unity and LightCore. A disadvantage of Spring.NET is, that  can only be configured with XML.

SimpleInjector, Hiro, Funq, Munq and Dynamo offer the best performance, they are extremely fast. Give them a try! Especially Simple Injector seems to be a good choice. It's very fast, has a good documentation and also supports advanced scenarios like interception and generic decorators.

Updates

13.09.2011: Funq and Munq have been added to the list of contestants, both frameworks are really fast. The updated charts do no more contain Spring.NET, since it was extremly slow.

04.11.2011: I added Simple Injector, the performance is the best of all contestants.

16.12.2011: I added Dynamo.Ioc, the performance is very close to Simple Injector and Hiro.

22.01.2012: Added TinyIoc.

22.02.2012: Updated IServiceLocator implementations.

12.03.2012: Added LightInject. Added feature comparison.

25.04.2012: Updated to Ninject 3.0.015 and Petite 0.3.2.

14.05.2012: Added Mugen.

14.06.2012: Added MEF.

18.06.2012: Added Griffin.

20.08.2012: Updated to Castle Windsor 3.1.0, LightInject 2.0.0.0, Simple Injector 1.5.0.12199, Structuremap 2.6.4.1, MugenInjection 2.6.0 and Unity 2.1.505.2

18.09.2012: Added Catel.

15.10.2012: Updated to Dynamo.Ioc 3.0.1.0 and MugenInjection 3.0.0

15.12.2012: Updated to Catel 3.4, Griffin.Container 1.1.0, SimpleInjector 1.6.0.12319, TinyIoC 1.2

01.01.2013: Added Caliburn.Micro 1.4

06.01.2013: Added Speedioc. Updated to Autofac 3.0.0, Caliburn.Micro.Container 1.4.1, LightCore 1.5.0

26.02.2013: Updated to Autofac 3.0.1, LightCore 1.5.1, Windsor 3.2.0

15.03.2013: Added benchmark for interception

03.04.2013: Added MicroSliver

11.04.2013: Updated several containers

09.05.2013: Updated LightInject, SimpleInjector and Unity

Source code

Latest source code is available on Github.

Downloads

IocPerformance.7z