VCL Form Vs Win Form performance (old posting)

[This a reproduction of a message in my old blog. It is reproduced here to remind me to retest this when the BDS 2007 is released]

There are plenty of noises on the Internet regarding the performance of Windows Forms (WinForm) Versus Delphi Forms but not too many of them are willing to publish any profiler results to back the claims.

While the results published here are not exhaustive, they are repetitive and are here to compare two aspects:

• How are Vcl.net, Vcl32 and Win form compared to each other on loading a form?
• Are they sensitive to the number of controls on a form?

The tool I used to profile them is AQTime4 from AutomatedQA, which can be used to profile, Delphi.Win32, Delphi.Net, C#, C++ (managed or unmanaged).

Two applications are developed. One, the Large App, has 1 tab control with 5 tab pages and they contains buttons (47), combo boxes (20), edit boxes (40), rich edit controls (12), and treeview (16). All together 241 controls.

The other is a lot smaller with 1 tab control 5 tab pages and all up 40 controls of similar types.

These applications were developed in Delphi.Win32 and re-compiled to Delphi.Net and then re-coded to WinForm using either Delphi or C# all using Delphi Studio 2006. All these applications did not contain any code other than what was generated by the Form Designer.

Here are the results for the large app:

Large application with 241 controls

Build Type	Method and Children	Time (sec)
VCL 32	TForm2::Create()	0.16606
VCL.Net	TForm2::ctor()	1.20292
WinForm/C#	WinForm::ctor()	0.2645

For smaller applications here are the results:

Small Applications with 40 controls

Build Type	Method and Children	Time (sec)
VCL.32	[No Debug Symbols]
VCL.Net	TForm1::ctor	0.53663
WinForm/Delphi	TWinForm12::ctor	0.21640

Profile results on two real applications one using Delphi3 and the other Delphi2006 produced data in agreement with the trend but with a much severe ratio because they contain actual code that increases the load time further.

From these data we can conclude:

1. VCL.Net is slower than VCL.Win32 and analysis of the call stacks in these two technologies revealed a lot more methods calls were involved in VCL.Net as compared to the lean VCL.32, even for reading form resources.
2. VCL.Net is also slower than WinForm, regardless of the language used to program it.
3. VCL.Net is more sensitive to the number of controls on a form as compared with WinForm, which is essentially flat. The ratio of VCL.Net : WinForm is 2.5 : 1 for a form with 40 controls as compared with 4.5 : 1 for one with 241 controls. Hence this means the load time of VCL.Net is sensitive to the number of controls on the form.
4. The WinForm is relatively insensitive to the number of controls on the form.

So here you are.