Years ago, when CPUs were very slow, the choice of the type of variable was actually an important choice. With modern managed programming languages, even the most primitive data types perform quite the same, but in some cases specific and different behaviors still exist regarding data type performance, in terms of throughput and resource usage.

The following is a sample application that is useful for checking data type speed in randomly generating and sum ten million data items of primitive values. Obviously, such sample code is not able to give any kind of absolute speed rating. It is a simple demonstration application that is useful for giving an idea of different data-type performance behavior:

//a random value generator
var r = new Random();

//repeat 10 times the test to have an averaged value
var stopwatchResults = new List<double>();

//a stopwatch for precision profiling
var w = new Stopwatch();

w.Start();
//change type here for testing...