The first thought that comes to mind is often adding memory or a faster processor, or choosing a faster operating system or web browser.

But many times (perhaps most times) the real culprit for slow performance is the programmer who wrote the software.

As a programmer, my philosophy is that I personally take responsibility for the performance of my programs, rather than require faster hardware or environment.  I have found that by forcing myself to think about the efficiency of every piece of code I write, the combined performance savings across an entire application is immense.

Think about it: if you save just a quarter of a second of time serving one page view, you have actually saved about 70 hours of processor time after a million page views.  And for a site like Lottery Post that gets many millions of page views a month... well, you can do the math.

With that concept in mind, I'd like to offer some tips about string concatenation that will make your programs more efficient.

String concatenation — the processing of combining strings together — is something that is still slow on many popular platforms.  For example, on all versions of Internet Explorer (up until IE8 is released), combining strings is very inefficient.  Even in the .NET framework, there are some ways of programming that will result in poor performance.

String Concatenation in .NET

In the .NET framework, whether you're programming in C# or VB, the best way to combine strings is using the String.Concat() method.  However, just using String.Concat() is not enough, and here's where the extra efficiency comes into play:

Make sure that all the arguments passed to String.Concat() are strong-typed Strings.  Otherwise, an overloaded version of the String.Concat() will be used that accepts all Object arguments, and each value you pass will be boxed to an Object (when passed) and un-box....

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