Hi Cor,

Thanks for your prompt response. I'm aware of the behaviour of strings with
regards to mutability, but this issue is different. Perhaps I didn't explain
myself clearly enough. I simply do not want to instantiate two different
string objects that have the same value.

Therefore, when I'm stepping through the byte[], the first time I see a
given pattern I would create the string and store it. The next time I see
the same pattern, I'll return a reference to the string I have stored. This
avoids the overhead of having two strings on the heap that have identical
values.

Bear in mind that I'm talking about doing this many many times a second, to
a point where I believe there is a performance gain to be reaped from this
added complexity.

Regards,

Drew.

Drewnoakes,

This sounds to the hashtable (dictionary) however I doubt that it will be
giving you benefits.

The bytepatern in the key and the string in the value.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...ClassTopic.asp

I hope however that it helps anyhow.

Cor

Hi Cor,

If I use a Hashtable, I must create a new byte[] which in turn is another
object allocation. I wish to achieve this lookup without allocating any
object on the heap.

Drew.

Drewnoakes,

Are you sure of that, the hashtable holds objects, not values.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...ssaddtopic.asp

I hope this helps,

Cor

Hi Cor,

Keying a hash table on byte[] will not reduce my memory overhead. Besides,
I still have to allocate an object (byte[] is an object, not a value-type)
before I can look up the string in the hashtable.

Drew.

Cor Ligthert [MVP] wrote:
integer hash value for the byte sequence and use that hash as a key in a
normal Hashtable.
But as someone has previously said, this will not necessarily improve
the performance.

Best regards
RG