c# - Should I be concerned about .NET dictionary speed?

Question

I will be creating a project that will use dictionary lookups and inserts quite a bit. Is this something to be concerned about?

Also, if I do benchmarking and such and it is really bad, then what is the best way of replacing dictionary with something else? Would using an array with "hashed" keys even be faster? That wouldn't help on insert time though will it?

Also, I don't think I'm micro-optimizing because this really will be a significant part of code on a production server, so if this takes an extra 100ms to complete, then we will be looking for new ways to handle this.

Answer 1

1. You are micro-optimizing. Do you even have working code yet? Remember, "If it doesn't work, it doesn't matter how fast it doesn't work." (Mich Ravera) http://www.codingninja.co.uk/best-programmers-quotes/.

   You have no idea where the bottlenecks will be, and already you're focused on Dictionary. What if the problem is somewhere else?

2. How do you know how the Dictionary class is implemented? Maybe it already uses an array with hashed keys!

P.S. It's really ".NET Dictionaries", not "C# Dictionaries", because C# is just one of several programming languages that use the framework.