IoC Container Benchmark - Performance comparison
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
or you develop for a specific platform, then not all containers are
suited. But especially in high-load scenarios like a web application, a
fast container can help you to serve more requests in the same time, so
why not choose the fastest one?
The test setup
The contestants
The number of available DI containers is quite big (see table below).
Some of the mature frameworks like Ninject or Unity are widly used but
are pretty slow.
Most of the younger containers offer a better performance. Internally most of them use compiled expressions to improve the resolve times.
The test setup
Several benchmarks are executed to test the performance of the containers in different scenarios. Every container is initialized with a couple of interfaces and their corresponding implementations. The types are registered with different lifetimes to support the various benchmarks.
Every interface is resolved 500.000 times during the benchmark and the time is measured in milliseconds. Each test is executed single threaded and multi threaded.
The benchmarks:
- Singleton: Objects with is singleton lifetime are resolved
- Transient: Objects with is transient lifetime are resolved
- Combined: Objects with two dependencies (singleton and transient lifetime) are resolved
- Complex: Objects with several nested dependencies are resolved
- Property: Objects which require property injection are resolved
- Generics: Objects with a generic dependency are resolved
- IEnumerable: Several objects that implement the same interface are resolved
- Conditional: Objects with a conditional dependency are resolved
- Child Container: Objects are resolved trough a child container
- Interception With Proxy: Objects with a dynamically generated wrapper are resolved
The results
Overview
Container | Singleton | Transient | Combined | Complex | Property | Generics | IEnumerable | Conditional | Child Container | Interception With Proxy |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
No | 108 78 | 126 116 | 147 168 | 222 206 | 348 176 | 107 106 | 275 177 | 214 180 | 1899 524 | 88 106 |
Autofac 3.5.2 | 893 723 | 2568 2571 | 6407 4071 | 18191 11244 | 32706 20892 | 5158 3346 | 17288 12199 | 108964 86101 | 51505 37712 | |
Caliburn.Micro 1.5.2 | 538 353 | 670 405 | 1867 1085 | 7969 4632 | 10427 6064 | 7758 4514 | ||||
Catel 3.9.0 | 351 431 | 4361 4901 | 13210 14088 | 32621 36346 | 12293 13237 | 4411 4783 | ||||
DryIoc 1.4.1 | 31 48 | 42 57 | 56 83 | 92 81 | 97 87 | 64 70 | 318 225 | 68 69 | ||
Dynamo 3.0.2.0 | 105 80 | 134 103 | 234 162 | 823 493 | 855 519 | |||||
fFastInjector 0.8.1 | 105 81 | 143 120 | 194 143 | 295 203 | ||||||
Funq 1.0.0.0 | 149 111 | 181 132 | 451 338 | 1327 852 | 1299 789 | |||||
Grace 2.4.2 | 188 127 | 303 294 | 907 926 | 2061 1291 | 2828 1589 | 707 467 | 2601 1645 | 805 536 | 17498 10605 | 8723 5580 |
Griffin 1.1.2 | 374 231 | 377 243 | 971 573 | 2813 1548 | ||||||
HaveBox 2.0.0 | 91 76 | 110 95 | 122 87 | 222 194 | 1119 697 | 2252 1373 | 868 538 | |||
Hiro 1.0.4.41795 | 207 140 | 209 146 | 219 154 | 290 199 | 3104 1931 | |||||
IfInjector 0.8.1 | 108 86 | 144 115 | 180 142 | 233 166 | 385 269 | 170 131 | ||||
LightCore 1.5.1 | 203 171 | 3364 1998 | 34315 34496 | 193101* 205435* | 2487 1843 | 23120 15653 | 52456 31250 | |||
LightInject 3.0.2.0 | 34 44 | 46 61 | 69 76 | 88 84 | 92 84 | 63 72 | 360 249 | 69 71 | 1825 1345 | |
LinFu 2.3.0.41559 | 4163 2443 | 24399 16041 | 64412 41898 | 170694 104578 | ||||||
Maestro 1.4.1 | 376 248 | 437 305 | 1349 1074 | 4123 2269 | 4699 2623 | 924 559 | 5146 2828 | 1178 695 | 11053 6279 | |
Mef 4.0.0.0 | 34967 19746 | 53521 31946 | 87598 65396 | 175864 169289 | 180329* 178984 | 198621* 151746 | 137126 140873 | |||
Mef2 1.0.27.0 | 295 201 | 290 204 | 379 439 | 633 403 | 1383 887 | 313 228 | 2587 2518 | |||
MicroSliver 2.1.6.0 | 566 303 | 818 543 | 2901 1802 | 8322 8170 | ||||||
Mugen 3.5.1 | 459 359 | 810 582 | 2380 1666 | 9042 6674 | 11883 7521 | 71914 76734 | 6944 7444 | 2060 1369 | 706941* OoM | 5051527* Error |
Munq 3.1.6 | 111 79 | 283 192 | 751 454 | 2389 1482 | 1899 1169 | |||||
Ninject 3.2.2.0 | 7259 4486 | 24276 15296 | 69214 39610 | 191033* 117563 | 165177 106569 | 67347 42019 | 151450 96672 | 53576 31926 | 45724250* 37677615* | 36162 22413 |
Petite 0.3.2 | 6626 4071 | 5546 3373 | 6971 4657 | 8246 6118 | 6297 3789 | |||||
QuickInject 1.0.0.7 | 171 184 | 203 189 | 224 232 | 519 594 | 163 151 | 1222506* 931325* | ||||
SimpleInjector 2.6.1 | 63 68 | 99 84 | 121 105 | 171 129 | 268 194 | 102 91 | 1214 597 | 222 169 | 8573 5065 | |
Spring.NET 1.3.2 | 1046 808 | 16566 10128 | 45510 29798 | 117230 75645 | 103584 66296 | 77502 43561 | ||||
StructureMap 3.1.4.143 | 2531 2831 | 2787 2845 | 8181 8274 | 19198 20205 | 18987 19486 | 5485 8342 | 17175 18164 | 3921913* 2703535* | 18162 12085 | |
StyleMVVM 3.1.5 | 656 454 | 543 383 | 833 527 | 2170 2363 | 2391 1093 | 1407 881 | 3703 4850 | 1598 965 | ||
TinyIoC 1.2 | 421 323 | 2705 1698 | 13719 6623 | 44567 28659 | 5275 5538 | 17576 11517 | ||||
Unity 3.5.1404.0 | 2873 3812 | 7182 3038 | 15294 8012 | 39116 21296 | 40234 21537 | 65395 41530 | 53041 31885 | 128682 82599 | ||
Windsor 3.3.0 | 519 383 | 2626 3658 | 8893 4861 | 26098 16700 | 52083 32659 | 27157 17004 | 26641 13537 | 340330* Error | 21772 13042 |
Basic features
Advanced features
Feature comparison
Performance | Configuration | Features | Environment | ||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Container | Code | XML | Auto | Autowiring | Custom lifetimes | Interception | Auto diagnostics | .NET | SL | WP7 | WP8 | WinRT | |
AutoFac | Average | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Caliburn.Micro | Average | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Catel | Average | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
DryIoc | Fast | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | No |
Dynamo | Fast | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | No |
fFastInjector | Fast | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
Funq | Fast | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Grace | Fast | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes |
Griffin | Fast | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | No | No |
HaveBox | Fast | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Hiro | Fast | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | No |
IfInjector | Fast | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
LightCore | Average | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
LightInject | Fast | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
LinFu | Slow | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | No | No |
Maestro | Average | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
MEF | Slow | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes |
MEF2 | Fast | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
MicroSliver | Average | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes |
Mugen | Average | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Munq | Fast | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | No |
Ninject | Slow | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
Petite | Fast | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | No |
QuickInject | Fast | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No |
SimpleInjector | Fast | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Speedioc | Fast | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | No |
Spring.NET | Very slow | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | No | No |
Stiletto | Average | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
StructureMap | Average | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes |
StyleMVVM | Fast | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | Yes | No |
TinyIoc | Average | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Unity | Average | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Windsor | Average | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | 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.
DryIoc, LightInject and SimpleInjector offer a very performance
combined with support for advanced scenarios like interception and
generic decorators.
Simple Injector and LightInject also provide extensive documentation and support all important platforms.
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
02.06.2013: Added fFastInjector and HaveBox. Updated Dynamo.IOC
16.06.2013: Updated HaveBox.
16.06.2013: Added StyleMVVM.
04.07.2013: Ian Johnson contributed some more advanced tests. Interesting to see how slow some containers are, when the object graph gets a little bigger.
26.07.2013: Added IfFastInjector.
03.08.2013: Added Stiletto.
03.09.2013: Updated several containers. Ignored Stiletto since it uses Fody, which makes some problems.
17.11.2013: Added Grace. Updated several containers.
15.12.2013: Added Maestro. Updated several containers.
11.02.2014: Added MEF2.
10.04.2014: Updated benchmark. Updated several containers.
02.06.2014: Added multi threaded tests. Updated several containers.
07.11.2014: Updated several containers.
13.11.2014: Added QuickInject.
Source code
Latest source code is available on Github.
New comment
Comments
Andrew
09/12/2011
Would you like to include some other less prominent IoCs in the comparison?Funq http://funq.codeplex.com/
Munq http://munq.codeplex.com/
S2Container.NET http://s2container.net.seasar.org/en/index.html
PicoContainer http://docs.codehaus.org/display/PICO/Home
Daniel
09/13/2011
@Andrew:Thanks for your hint. I have added Funq and Munq to the comparison. PicoContainer is a Java container and Seasar is not very easy to use, so I did not add these frameworks.
Funq and Munq are really fast.
Ady
11/03/2011
Could you state the version of each IOC that you have compared ?Daniel
11/03/2011
@Ady:I added the version information
Pranav Shah
12/16/2011
Would you consider adding two more to the list:http://www.dynamoioc.com/
http://www.dynamoioc.com/
I came across them while reading another article:
http://blog.opennetcf.com/ctacke/2011/04/29/BenchmarkingOpenNETCFsIoCFramework.aspx
tibel
01/21/2012
Please check also:https://github.com/grumpydev/TinyIoC
http://microioc.codeplex.com/
Another interesting point would be, if the IoC container will also work on silverlight, compact framework or WP7...
Marijn
02/01/2012
Interesting read. Any thought on why you think Spring.NET is so slow? Maybe you could update your post to clarify that your test is only testing ServiceLocator style usage of the container.Daniel
02/01/2012
@Marijn:I don't know why Spring is that slow.
I'm only testing service location, since all other features like interception are not supported by all containers.
Will
02/09/2012 | http://www.storm-studios.net
Not sure why xml configuration is a detriment. I hear developers complain about that and I just scratch my head. Oh, well, Spring.NET with all of it's useful facilities works for me.Tomas Jansson
02/22/2012 | http://blog.tomasjansson.com
Interesting comparison, but...I've downloaded your code and I don't think you give the framework funq a fair comparison. The strength in funq is that it is using generics and therefor doesn't need to use any reflection and everything is already typed. If you look at munq, which I think is a fork of funq, it has really impressive numbers and funq should have approximately the same. Also, I changed your implementation and inherited directly from IServiceLocator instead of ServiceLocatorImpl and got numbers that are far from you result.
So please, when you do a benchmark do it the way that shows of the strength of all the frameworks.
Daniel
02/22/2012
@Tomas:Thanks for your feedback. I changed the code accordingly. Now I inherit directly from IServiceLocator. Funq and Petite perform much better now.
Prakash
03/03/2012
Would been interesting if you add an extra column in your to result that would show flexibility cost or feature count. Then one would be able to see how feature rich the framework is versus performance.After all its all about balance choosing the right tool for the job.
Prakash
gold price
04/18/2012 | http://goldpricetoday.ws
My site is using ninject. May be change to use Dynamo in the near feature. Thanks for your post!Martin
04/25/2012
I was wondering if you would consider upgrading the versions to the newest ones and re-running.If not, I'm sure I can try it myself, just thought it might be useful...
Specifically, Ninject 3.0 as I love the syntax, just hoping it's got some comparable performance.
Yours is the most updated blog I've found on this at the moment...
Daniel
04/25/2012
@Martin:I just updated to the latest versions. Thanks for your hint.
Martin
04/26/2012
Interesting, it doesn't seem to have affected the performance very much...I like Ninject's syntax, and it helps that it's the one suggested by Steve Sanderson in the Pro ASP.NET MVC3 book.
Do you have any thoughts on this?
Daniel
04/28/2012
@Martin:I think that the syntax doesn't matter that much.
But if you like it and the performance is good enough for your needs, keep using Ninject.
The dependencies should be configured at a single place (the composition root), so it should be easy to replace Ninject with something else as soon as required.
Dzmitry Lahoda
05/18/2012
Do not you think that using small amount of types leads to false results?Dzmitry
05/18/2012
There are features like Constructor/Property/Method Injection. Unity supports all. May be if turn some off then Unity will be faster (as containers without such features)?Dzmitry
05/18/2012
Real worlds scenarios involve complex object graphs. Some containers could work better or worse in such case. So current tests make me to doubtful about results.Daniel
05/18/2012
@Dzmitry:My performance test does not test all features of all containers and and only uses a few types.
If you have configured more types, the results may change.
I never claimed, that my test is perfect for all scenarios! But the various containers show a very different performance even with a few types.
Feel free to create you own test with more complex object graphs.
Last but not least: Performance is not the only criteria that you have to consider when choosing an IOC.
Nicholas Blumhardt
08/01/2012 | http://nblumhardt.com
Hi Daniel! Interesting to see just how many options we have now :)Autofac does have custom lifetime support- it is very flexible and is in use today supporting per-thread, per-request, per-transaction, per-message, per-view model and many other scenarios.
We did quite a bit of profiling on the MEF team when creating Microsoft.Composition (http://nuget.org/packages/microsoft.composition) and learnt some interesting things in the process.
First, concurrency makes a HUGE difference to how containers stack up; some scale linearly as CPUs are added, while others actually slow down severely. It would be interesting to see a longer-running concurrent version of these benchmarks.
Second, in real life scenarios using Composition Root, deeper graphs of transient instances appear a lot, e.g. In MVC apps. Performance on deeper graphs is also interesting.
Third, over longer (several minute) runs, the amount of garbage created by the container affects performance. This makes a big difference to throughput that may not show in short runs.
Cheers! Nick
Jonas Gauffin
08/22/2012 | http://blog.gauffin.org
My container (Griffin) now supports interceptionVan Thoai Nguyen
09/11/2012 | http://thoai-nguyen.blogspot.com
Thanks for the list.Is it really a matter of how fast the container is? Who's gonna resolve that much objects in a short time? In my opinion, just choose your favorite container. I used to be happy with Unity, StructureMap and now Autofac is my favorite choice.
Just wonder why people like to invent other libraries. If you can list out the pros and cons of these thing, that would be great.
Cheers.
Daniel
09/11/2012
@Thoai Nguyen:Performance is only one criteria among many others. In a desktop application the speed of your container doesn't matter that much. But in a web application things are different. When you handle many requests (using several servers), it makes a difference how much time you waste for setting up your dependencies.
But as I said, it's only one criteria. If your favorite container is fast enough for your needs, just keep using it.
Frantisek Jandos
10/03/2012
Spring.NET gives much better results, when object is resolved using its name, if SpringContainerAdapter.Resolve() method is rewritten to return (T)container.GetObject(typeof(T).FullName); it will give results ~2x slower for singleton and ~8x slower for transient & combined in comparison to Windsor. I vote for returning it back to the graph as Spring.NET deserves it at least for its excellent documentation in comparison to Windsor :)Martin
10/14/2012
Dynamo.IoC is in version 3 now.I just compared performance against SimpleInjector and it is almost double as fast when it comes to resolving transient instances in my test case.
I think your feature comparison should also include if the container supports multiple registrations for each type (etc. using keys). For an example SimpleInjector does not support this last time I looked at it (as far as i remember).
Daniel
10/15/2012
@Frantisek:Thanks for your hint. I updated the code accordingly.
@Martin:
Thanks for your comment. I will update the blog post soon.
I will not add a comparison that tests multiple registrations per type, since not all containers support that feature.
Martin
10/16/2012
Daniel: I just meant adding it to the feature list (not testing it).Ken
12/01/2012 | http://kennethxu.blogspot.com
>> LinFu and Ninject are both much faster than Spring.NETI didn't get this part. You date clearly indicates that Sprint.Net is much faster than that two. What was wrong? the conclusion or data?
Daniel
12/01/2012
@Ken:Thanks for your hint. The post isn't up to date in all parts.
I will update this within the next days.
John
01/01/2013
Hi,please add Caliburn.Micro to list.
Thanks.
ChrisW
01/15/2013
Someone stole your blog post !http://fukyo-it.blogspot.fi/2012/10/ioc-container-benchmark-performance.html
Daniel
01/15/2013
@ChrisW:I know. But he didn't steal the updates :-)
Steven
02/14/2013 | http://www.cuttingedge.it/blogs/steven
Martin is right, Simple Injector does not support keyed registrations. And for good reasons (http://bit.ly/Vj5epb). Keyed registrations are a design smell and if you need them, you should review your design. It's true that some containers make it impossible to implement particular features without keyed registrations (Unity needs them to register decorators for instance http://bit.ly/XQa9wy), but that's not the case with Simple Injector. The only time I ever saw keyed registrations to make sense in Simple Injector was when a user needed to implement an hybrid lifestyle, but this is fixed in Simple Injector 2.0. That version contains a feature to easily build hybrid lifestyles.I challenge Martin to come up with an example where keyed registrations are useful (with Simple Injector).
Tim
02/19/2013
Hi Daniel,Very nice post. I really like the ongoing updates!
I'm definitely going to look at the fast performance containers for my WP7 projects.
(I'm not sure Munq is right for WP7 though. Full project title is "Tools for ASP.NET MVC")
Cheers, Tim
AceHack
03/13/2013
I'm a little confused by your MEF version numbers. I'm assuming by MEF 4.0.0.0 you mean the MEF that was included with .NET framework 4 (MEF 1.0). If so can you please test MEF 4.5.0.0 or what I would call MEF 2.0, the one that is included with .NET 4.5 as they made several decisions to increase performance by dropping features. Also as a separate test could you test MEF for Windows Store Apps? I really consider this almost a different IoC than the core framework version at lest for your tests. Thanks so much this is AWESOME!!! http://nuget.org/packages/microsoft.compositionDaniel
03/13/2013
@AceHack:The version 4.0.0.0 refers to the version of 'System.ComponentModel.Composition.dll'.
I already use .NET 4.5 for executing my tests. Since .NET 4.5 replaces .NET 4.0 I'm not able to compare with the MEF version that was distributed with .NET 4.0.
Changing the "Target framework" of the solution to version 4.5 does not affect the results significantly.
AceHack
03/14/2013
@Daniel how about Microsoft.Composition package on nuget I linked to earlier? Can you incorporate those results? They are in the namespace System.Composition.AceHack
03/14/2013
@Daniel: Again thanks so much for all your work, I was curious it would be great if you also add a column for if it's supported on Windows Store Apps and WP8. Also I would be very, very grateful if you would test the DynamicProxy speeds of the ones that support it.Daniel
03/14/2013
@AceHack:I'm pretty busy at the moment. So it will take some time to add tests for WinRT.
Testing dynamic proxy performance is a good idea. I think I will add this to the benchmark.
Could you check which containers support Windows Store Apps and/or WP8? I can then add your results to the feature table.
Steve
03/20/2013
Hi Daniel,Nice writeup - there are some pretty key variances between registrations that are impacting containers differently. Lets start at the top of the list and take autofac as an example.
Autofac registration looks like this:
builder.RegisterType<Combined>().As<ICombined>();
That call relies on reflection on instantiation to decide on the ctor to use.
Funq on the other hand looks like this:
builder.RegisterType<ICombined>( c => new Combined(c.Resolve<ISingleton>(), s.Resolve<ITransient>());
That call does not rely on reflection - in fact the ability to rely reflection is not supported by Funq, so there is a key difference.
To tidy these up, in Autofac you would register as follows:
builder.Register<ICombined>(c => new Combined(c.Resolve<ISingleton>(), c.Resolve<ITransient>());
This cuts significant time off any container that falls into this distinction.
Another key is being able to imply Func<T> based upon a registration of <T>. Most containers don't allow this, but it's a key operation for anyone doing modern Dependency Inversion. Of the ones that do support it, most are faster at Func<T>() execution compared to .Resolve<T>(), but some are actually slower. Knowing this difference and capability would be helpful. When you consider this optimization, then direct ctor registration could be helped with another level of lambda lifting.
Daniel
03/20/2013
@Steve:You are absolutely right, Funq only supports explicit constructor registration. That means autowiring is not supported by Funq, which is a major drawback, since you have to change the configuration every time the constructor changes.
You should use autowiring whenever possible, because that means less maintenance work.
I did not configure explicit constructors in my benchmark, when a container supports autowiring.
It's the container's problem to resolve the constructor dependencies in a fast way. And containers like SimpleInjector show, that it is possible to do this very fast.
David Walker
06/01/2013 | http://www.grax.com
Excellent post! I used your code to get the numbers and graphs for my post on my new fFastInjector. According to your code, it is the fastest dependency injector yet.The post: http://coding.grax.com/2013/06/how-fast-is-ffastinjector.html
The code: https://ffastinjector.codeplex.com/
The NuGet package: https://nuget.org/packages/fFastInjector/
Christian Henrik Reich
06/02/2013
Hi Daniel,Super post.
I have just released my own ioc container, which I also thinks is the fastest :-), based on my own benchmarks against SimpleInjector.
It is called HaveBox, and I would like to hear, if you can add it to you page?
HaveBox and full documentation can be found here:
https://bitbucket.org/Have/havebox/wiki/Home
https://www.nuget.org/packages/HaveBox/
Cheers,
Christian Henrik Reich
Karim
06/03/2013
fFastInjector seems to be a good choice too (winRT support) but no interception feature.I Hope that Simple Injector will support WinRT soon.
PS: On your feature comparison table fFastInjector is marked as fFastContainer.
dadhi
06/04/2013
I think it will be plus to include minimal .Net Version supported into .NET column. Some containers are taking advantages of latest .Net (e.g. Expession.Block from .Net 4.0) but mine real-project requirements are .Net 3.5. So those containers are no use for me.Be aware
06/04/2013
Something to notice about fFastInjector is that it is static, and it is made pretty much only for speed by creating a static generic class for every registration instead of storing them in some sort of collection like all the other (it does use a collection - but only to map resolving by Type to the static generic class).The thing is that if you use something like MVC everything is resolved using the Type and not using a generic parameter, and then the performance decreases.
So it performs very nice under the test conditions but in a real world scenario it is no different from the other fast containers, and doesn't have the same feature set and seems difficult (if not currently impossible) to extend with custom lifetime registrations (for example perRequest or perSession lifetimes for Web scenarios or perThread etc.).
I would recommend that the tests are change to resolve using the most basic way (using the Type and not Generics) to prevent this scenario.
Resolving using the generic parameter is only relevant if you are manually wiring everything up yourself, if you are using auto-wiring which I hope pretty much everybody prefer, then the Type is used.
Also if you look at HaveBox it will also perform very good in a test like this where the same type is resolved x number of times, because it stores the registration for the last resolved type so it can quickly return it. But in a real world scenario how often is the same type returned every single time? - Never.
So this is solely implemented for it to cheat in a test like this as it will be a performance decrease in any real world scenario (so what else could be the reason behind the decision to implement it like that?). Because of this I actually think it should be banned from the tests until it is changed.
Also something even more important, the way this "cheat"/cache is implemented seems to be a problem in a multi-threaded scenario where several types are Resolved at the same time by different threads - look at the method GetTypeDetails in the Container.cs - what happens if GetInstance<>() is called while another thread is in the middle of assigning those variables (the ternary operator is not guaranteed to be thread-safe) ? *BOOM* *Mis-match in the type returned and an exception is thrown*...
Have a nice day. :)
Christian Henrik Reich
06/11/2013 | https://bitbucket.org/Have/havebox/wiki/Home
Hi Daniel,I have just released HaveBox-1.1.0, and I hope you will update your page with new version.
The slow MakeGenericMethod is not needed anymore, now you can call GetInstance(Type type), and get a more realistic view from the benchmarks
Auto registration has been available since version 1.0.0 via Scan, but I have added new features:
Custom lifetime
Support for Silverlight 4, Silverlight 5, Windows Phone 7.1 and Windows Phone 8
It is available from Nuget: http://www.nuget.org/packages/HaveBox/
Cheers,
Christian Henrik Reich
Christian Henrik Reich
06/16/2013 | https://bitbucket.org/Have/havebox/wiki/Home
Hi Daniel,I have just released HaveBox 1.2.0, besides adding new features, I have been optimizing it for speed.
Cheers,
Christian Henrik Reich
Ian Johnson
06/18/2013 | http://stylemvvm.codeplex.com
Hi Daniael,I was wondering if you'd be interested in doing a Part 2 of this blog that covers more advanced cases of DI. While this is a great start I feel like a lot of your readers have far more complex DI needs, covering this like Open generics, conditionals and large object graphs would be really interesting.
I'd be more than willing to lend a hand in code some of it up. Email me back if you are interested.
thanks
-Ian
Nikhil Pinto
06/18/2013
I was under the impression that Ninject supports Interception. I have seen plenty of examples demonstrating AOP for which Interception i believe is a must.PS: I am a novice with IOC containers ...so not really sure... can you please confirm if i am right or wrong.
Daniel
06/18/2013
@Nikhil:There is an extension for Ninject:
https://github.com/ninject/ninject.extensions.interception
Christian Henrik Reich
06/28/2013 | http://www.havebox.net
I have released HaveBox-1.3.0, which is optimized for speed.It also has instantiation interception, as a new feature.
Cheers,
Christian Henrik Reich
David Walker
07/02/2013 | http://grax.com/
A more detailed response to comment #48 is athttp://coding.grax.com/2013/07/response-to-ffastinjector-concerns.html
The short version is: fFastInjector is not just fast, it is also small and I believe it to be very reliable. It is not very mature and I expect to be able to provide significant improvements, such as custom registrations in the near future.
I think it would be reasonable to test both the generic resolution and the type parameter-based resolution to compare the speeds of each method.
In my projects the generic resolution is the preferred method and fFastInjector is optimized for that but should actually still be extremely fast either way.
Christian Henrik Reich
07/04/2013 | http://www.havebox.net
Good Work, Ian Johnsen :-)Jury Soldatenkov
07/12/2013
I've tested HaveBox 1.3 from official Nuget feed. It look like a cheatware, that could not be used really. Two main issues I found:1. Creates singletons eagerly, at registration time. Consequently it does not handles dependencies. If class A (singleton) depends on B, you have to register B before A. KeyNotFoundException otherwise.
2. Does not handle cyclic dependencies, just throws ugly KeyNotFoundException.
Christian Henrik Reich
07/13/2013 | http://www.havebox.net
Hi Jury,I'm very glad you have spend your time testing my container.
I'm trying to make HaveBox a highly usable tool for programming, and not cheatware.
If you have found a bug, you should have raised it, via the issue system on the HaveBox page, and thereby contributing to making it a better ioc-container. I have no chance to fix the container, if I have to crawl to web for issues.
Cheers
Christian Henrik Reich
Christian Henrik Reich
07/13/2013 | http://www.havebox.net
It is properly not the right forum to discuss this, so Daniel I hope you will allow this comment.@Jury Soldatenkov, regarding #57
I have been investigating Have-1.3.0 for the issues you mention, and regarding your singleton issue.
I can only reproduce it, by doing step wise configuration like this.
container.Configure(x => x.For<IFoo1>().Use<Foo1().AsSingleton());
container.Configure(x => x.For<IFoo2>().Use<Foo2>());
It is true that HaveBox-1.3.0 does resolve singletons eagerly. When the Configure goes out of scope, HaveBox builds the dependency graph, and if there is information missing it will throw an exception. This is the nature of HaveBox.
By having Foo1 with Foo2 as dependency, and then doing the stepwise configuring as above. You are telling container that Foo1 have dependencies of types, unknown to the container. The container has no chance to know your intentions, about register the Foo2 later or not. Therefore I think an exception is fair, when trying to depending on unregistered type. Lazy or eagerly singletons, I'm not sure it makes sense in general to depend on types, there is yet to be registered.
I'm sure you have your got reasons, if you have your step-wise configurations. But my recommendation is to
configure most a possibly at ones, like:
container.Configure(x =>
{
x.For<IFoo1>().Use<Foo1>().AsSingleton();
x.For<IFoo2>().Use<Foo2>();
});
Thereby order is also becoming less important.
Lazy resolved singleton is scheduled for later release. Regarding cycle dependencies, now where you mentioned it, I'll look into that too. For further discussion, you are welcome to write me at HaveBox2013@gmail.com
As last comment, I find it harsh and unfair to label HaveBox-1.3.0 as cheatware, because it doesn't fits your needs.
Cheers,
Christian Henrik Reich
Ian Johnson
07/14/2013 | http://stylemvvm.codeplex.com
Hi Jury,I don't think Havebox is cheatware. It might have a smaller feature set than some other DI containers but it's not cheatware.
I will say though that since there are some many different ways to solve these problems there are some discrepancies in the way that these things are implemented and configured. So you end up comparing containers that autowire to ones that don't. Containers that require the developer to know all Exports when registering an IEnumerable and some containers that allow the developer to register multiple implementations for one Interface and then resolves all interfaces into an IEnumerable.
You have to really look at the implementation and see what use cases it solves that you are interested in (feature set including configuration), with what type of performance you need.
I guarantee you if you went to an ninject discussion board people would run you out with data points of ninject solving their problems in a perfectly per-formant manner. So it's all about your use case ...
YMMV
Jury Soldatenkov
07/15/2013
Hi, Christian.Ok, I was too rude when called HaveBox cheatware. Let me explain.
The main issue with singleton is not the eager instantiating itself (still very unpleasant), but consequent obligatory registration order.
It's impossible to scan assebmlies and perform batch registration.
That's why I think you should be fair with yourself. HaveBox is not-ready-to-production-ware, and should be excluded from benchmark.
Or put it in a section "prototype races".
PS. As an exercise I've tried to write my own container, and it takes about 5 hours to make it with fair singleton and trasient support, and detect cyclic dependencies.
Resolve speed is the same as HB, but registration is longer.
Christian Henrik Reich
07/15/2013 | http://www.havebox.net
Hi Jury,I still don't know your situation or how you configure HaveBox, but if you scan your assemblies and do your batch operations in one scope, then there is no order requirements. You can even use sub-configs to organize it, and keep it maintainable. So what you are saying are not quite true.
Again HaveBox can't depend on types it doesn't know, and that it how it works. If HaveBox's configure part don't
works in the way you want it to, then there is a lot of alternative container to use, you even have your own container now, use that.
You are the only one, I have ever heard of, who has issues with the config.
HaveBox's IS production ready. Just because HaveBox doesn't fits exactly your requirements, does not make it less production ready,
it just means it is maybe not the right tool for you. Where is the line for production ready and or not? If I implements deferred dependency resolving, which you feel is missing, do HaveBox then cross the line for production ready? What if the next person, who doesn't care about deferred resolving, comes afterwards an points out xml configuration is missing, is HaveBox then on the not-ready-for-production side again? Is Unity not-ready-for-production, because it can't do generic resolving? It all comes down to features, and choosing the container which solves you problem.
By suggestion removing HaveBox from the benchmarks, is at the same low level as proclaiming that HaveBox is cheatware. It also show that you have misunderstood this benchmark page. The page shows performance for resolving, not for how the container is configured. Some of the contestants, do not even have auto-wiring, which some find basic container behaviour, should they be disallowed to? As I understand, here room for every container, which I find good.
I really don't understand, why you spend your time on HaveBox, when it is obversely not suited for you. Your time could be used much better on a project with another container, than flaming HaveBox.
Cheers,
Christian Henrik Reich
Mike
07/26/2013 | https://github.com/iamahern/IfFastInjector
@Danial: Thanks for getting IfFastInjector up there so quickly!Christian Henrik Reich
07/31/2013 | http://www.havebox.net
Hi Daniel,Regarding HaveBox 1.4.0, I have tried to make a pull request, but I can't see if it is sent or not.
Cheers,
Christian Henrik Reich
Christian Henrik Reich
08/01/2013 | http://www.havebox.net
Hi,I would like to point out, that HaveBox 1.4.0 is using HaveBoxProxy for interception. HaveBoxProxy, do not support functions with generics and out parameters yet.
Please have this in mind, when intercepting with HaveBox.
Cheers,
Christian Henrik Reich
Mike
08/03/2013 | https://github.com/iamahern/IfFastInjector
Hi Daniel,Again - thanks for maintaining this. Some minor corrections to the feature tables above:
Environment/SL: Yes
Configuration/Auto: Maybe?
I am not sure how you are defining auto configuration - but you can do stuff similar to Ninjit such as:
==============
@IfImplementedBy(typeof(MyType))
interface IMyType{}
@IfSingleton
class MyType {}
....
var injector = IfInjector.NewInstance();
IMyType instance = injector.Resolve<IMyType>();
==============
With the latest updated to the benchmark push I sent you I should (until HaveBox 1.5 comes out next week LOL :-) win the property injection benchmark.
Cheers,
Mike
Christian Henrik Reich
08/05/2013 | http://ww.havebox.net
Hi Mike,Congrats, with the good result on property injections, it is going to be hard to beat:-)
Cheers,
Christian Henrik Reich
Daniel
09/01/2013
Ninject supports both interception and Xml config via extensions.Brent Roady
09/03/2013
Unity 3.0 (current release) now supports auto configuration (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/agile/archive/2013/03/12/unity-configuration-registration-by-convention.aspx), if you want to update the Feature Comparison grid.Thanks for the excellent resource!
Rajiv Mounguengue
09/06/2013
Hi Daniel, Catel supports Interception now.Thomas
10/24/2013
Great Work! Helped me a lot to decide witch IoC to use in projects!ashley wardell
11/13/2013 | http://www.soundblitzdisco.co.uk
Hi there.Firstly can i say this has been one of the most useful links i have found in a which. Thanks for putting the effort into this.
a few comments.
I noticed that structuremaps registry does not seem to have an equivalent in simpleinjector. Obvs. this can be custom written but would have been nice. Would be nice to know which features such as this are available on each framework.
Also out of the box lifecycles is a factor when i have decided which DI framework to use.
I wondered if you could add these pieces of functionality to this article
Daniel
11/13/2013
@ashley wardell:I'm sorry but I don't have the time to cover all possible details of every container.
Projects are very different so you have to make a choice yourself :-)
Ian Johnson
11/17/2013 | http://grace.codeplex.com
@AshleyWhile performance for a DI container is important, feature set and configurability are also very import when choosing which container to use.
I think it's really interesting to look at Daniel's performance tests in-conjunction with the feature tests located at http://diframeworks.apphb.com/
It's a matter of balancing the features you want with the performance you can live with.
-Ian
Ivan
11/24/2013
Daniel, please change value to Yes in Interception Column of Feature Comparison table for LightInject container, because it have this feature. Proof: http://www.lightinject.net/# (Interception link on top)Valy
01/05/2014
DryIoc use an AVL tree instead of a dictionary that performs better for small size services. So I don't think the comparison is fair enough.dadhi
01/08/2014 | https://bitbucket.org/dadhi/dryioc
Hi Valy,Take into account that services directly resolved from Container are usually resolution roots, that is a small subset of all registered services.
Here I am assuming Container usage mostly avoiding Service Locator (anti)pattern.
In that case DryIoc performs just fine by given fast access to resolution roots.
Ian Johnson
01/08/2014 | http://grace.codeplex.com
Hi dadhi,I think Valy's point was that as more types are registered you're performance will degrade. Which is going to be true for all lookup containers not just tree structures. It's just that you will lose that performance benefit when the tree is loaded with more entries.
Personally I don't see a problem with it, this is just a general guideline tests and you need to look at your individual use cases and see if a container will work well for you. It really doesn't matter if the container uses trees, dictionaries, or arrays as long as it meets your needs.
That being said always pay attention to feature set and configuration when choosing a container.
-Ian
dadhi
01/09/2014 | https://bitbucket.org/dadhi/dryioc
Valy, Ian,What I wanted to say that AVL tree implementation in DryIoc serves to speedup access to resolution roots, not all of the registered services. The rest of registry uses Dictionary internally.
Anyway tree performance degradation is not that big. Here the results of my benchmark:
Comparing worst case of lookup for item in tree with normal access to dictionary 1 000 000 times (it is Type to Object for both):
for 20 items: Dict - 37ms, Tree - 10ms
for 2000 items: Dict - 37ms, Tree - 18ms
In addition I want to say that tree is not the only thing to improve performance, there are other things as well.
Ian Johnson
01/09/2014 | http://grace.codeplex.com
Dadhi,Very interesting. Do you allow the container to be modified as it's being used? If so how are you handling concurrency?
dadhi
01/10/2014 | https://bitbucket.org/dadhi/dryioc
Ian,Register and Resolve could be done concurrently. Registry consistency is preserved with single SyncRoot locking.
When you resolve service, delegate is cached in tree which is immutable which enables lock-free access.
Regarding container change there are so many aspects to that, but in general case newly added registrations won't affect already resolved/cached delegates. Which is fine I think. If you need you could resolve services as Many<T> which is aware of new registrations or use subcontainer for resulution and then drop it to drop the cache. I am planning to write on this topic in wiki.
There is also plan to introduce cache skip policy in Resolve in future versions.
Mike
01/11/2014 | https://github.com/iamahern/IfInjector
Hi Dadhi,I apologize, but I can't find another way to contact you.
I plugged your AvlTree into my SafeDictionary class and it worked great. Any issue if I reuse your implementation in IfInjector?
If it is ok, what sort of accreditation line would you like?
Mike
dadhi
01/13/2014 | https://bitbucket.org/dadhi/dryioc
Hi Mike,Please go ahead and use. It is interesting to see how it adapts.
As for accreditation, I probably put HashTree separately into Github or Bitbucket under MIT license. So you can include link when it's done.
P.S. You can contact me through my bitbucket or github accounts.
JP
03/06/2014
Which of these is the easiest to learn & implement?Mike
03/21/2014
Mine of course (IfInjector) - LOL!Actually, the first three questions you should ask are:
1. What features do you need?
2. What platforms do you need to run on?
- If you need to run on something exotic like Xamarin / iOS, a legacy version of Windows Phone or XBox. This dramatically alters the list of options available.
3. How performance sensitive are you?
- Do you need something that create instances of objects quickly OR are you just wiring up a bunch of singletons? In the latter case, the performance listed here becomes less important as it is a one-time overhead cost... although it can still be a painful drag on your unit tests.
==========
Beyond this you want to go with something that is well supported and documented. Dependency injection is not that complicated so the complexity is (in general) not that different between containers for the basics. When you get down to the complex features though - the documentation will be the difference between a simple and an easy task.
At least from the ones I have looked at, SimpleInjector seems to hit the sweet-spot of top tier performance and good documenation AS well as having a great story around customization and extensibility to meeting a variety of use cases. Ninject, while slower, has versions to run on a wider variety of platforms and has a great community / documentation. On iOS all of these benchmarks would be moot anyhow.
Take a quick peak through the docs of the containers that meet your performance / platform requirements - then go with the one with the best documentation.
Tristan
04/19/2014
Since 2.4 Simple Injector support WP8 and winRTIt also supports Mono which is great with the rise of Xamarin.
Wayne Blackmon
04/30/2014
I just tried out both SimpleInjector and LightINject in an ASP.NET Web API (MVC 5, Web API) application (along with recommended Web API and MVC 5 libraries). SimpleInjector caused a yellow screen of death (it seemed to conflict with System.Web.Http) and LightInject actually corrupted the project file and caused the application to not load in Visual Studio 2013. Both SimpleInjector and LightInject just didnt work with MVC 5 and Web API 2.I rolled back the project and installed Unity. No problems with Unity.
William Ziebell
05/06/2014 | https://twitter.com/WilliamZiebell
Grigori Melnik from Microsoft blogged on Apr. 21, 2014 that Unity 3.5 RTW was released. He stated that, "In running micro-benchmarks, we have consistently seen a performance improvement of Unity core operations by ~60%." It would be nice to see the Final Release version benchmarked here.Also, this version of Unity is now a portable class library with support for Xamarin/Mono (Xamarin.iOS v7 and Xamarin.Android v4.12). Perhaps a column for Xamarin Support in the Feature comparison is now in order.
Daniel
05/06/2014
@William:The results table already shows the latest Unity release (version 3.5.1404.0)
Hakan
05/10/2014
LightInject can support context per request?for implement unit of work
Robert
06/13/2014
Why don't you rather change graph scale to logarithmic. It would be easier to distinguish graph details of both the slow ones and quick ones.Robert
06/13/2014
And it would also be much better if you didn't use stacked bars in the "Advanced features" as not all bars include all features. Each feature should be a separate graphs so one could compare on individual ones (and those that are missing).Daniel
06/13/2014
@Robert:I tried to use logarithmic scale in the overview charts, but comparision is much harder then.
Individual graphs are generated for each benchmark, but they are not published on my blog. Feel free to run this on your machine:
https://github.com/danielpalme/IocPerformance/blob/master/IocPerformance/Output/ChartOutput.cs
Michael Tsai
06/16/2014
Hi Daniel,Would you further explain why you think Autofac does not support custom lifetime management?
Thank you for the awesome work!
Daniel
06/18/2014
@Michael:Autofac allows you to scope objects, but I'm not aware of a possibility to create a custom lifetime. Can you point me to some documentation?
s
06/18/2014
One of the features that doesn't seem to be part of the comparison is keyed registration. I could see why it would be overlooked, thinking that any/every IoC container would support that, but that's definitely *not* the case. If you're looking to switch from one IoC to another it's important to know. Especially since this post seems to be touting SimpleInjector as one of the best in terms of performance and advanced scenarios when it doesn't even support one of the most basic scenarios! Sorry to pick on SimpleInjector, but that just happens to be the one that I was looking at.Daniel
06/20/2014
@S:I don't sure what you mean with "keyed registration". Do you mean registering a component with a custom name?
In case you are using SimpleInjector you can use RegisterWithContext() method. I think that approach is preferable to named registrations, otherwise you have to explicitly request the named component.
S
06/20/2014
Is that method an extension method that's part of a separate assembly or perhaps obsolete? I can't find it and I'm using the latest version of SimpleInjector from http://www.nuget.orgDaniel
06/20/2014
@S: It's an extension: https://simpleinjector.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Advanced-scenarios#Context-Based-InjectionIan Johnson
06/21/2014 | https://github.com/ipjohnson/Grace
S,Simple Injector doesn't support keyed registration, look at comment #35 from the author simple injector. He refers to it as a "code smell" and therefore doesn't support it.
Most everything with Simple Injector is offered as code add on later that you include in your application, hence no NuGet package.
If you are looking for a fast container that does support keyed registration check out Grace. It has a very large feature set and has good performance.
-Ian
Malachi Burke
07/19/2014
Thank you for this!Mac
07/28/2014
Probably a dumb question, but what are the two numbers listed for each test? Registration vs resolution, maybe?Federico
08/18/2014 | http://thepiratblog.blogspot.com
Excellent article!I think you should change the value of column "Auto" for the row "MEF 2", since it does provides auto-wiring.
Mick
08/21/2014
Nice work. But really, who injects half a million objects? I think in a typical web request in our system which uses NInject we would make between 10-100 injections. Your article is thorough but in a sense misleading as it makes people focus on something that for 99.99% of the people out there is a complete non-issue.I think some time ago a really smart programmer such as yourself pointed out the difference in execution speed of virtual methods versus static methods on static classes. The result is he has doomed generations of average to sub-average developers to never writing OOP code.
Andrew
08/26/2014
What is it the Auto column at the feature section?Ph.Tp
11/07/2014
Could you update your benchmark with the latest versions of containers, please?