How does LLBLGen Pro Stack up Against Nhibernate Performance Wise

Question

I have search the internet high and low looking for any performance information for LLBLGen Pro. None found. Just wanted to know how does LLBLGen Pro perform compared the Nhibernate. Thanks

Answer 1

Initially we tested LLBLGen @ ORMBattle.NET, it was ~ 2 times faster than NH on materialization; LINQ query compilation time was pretty good (~ 4000 queries/sec.), but CUD operations were noticeably slower than in NH (there is no CUD batching in LLBLGen).

Both frameworks must be relatively slow in case when you deal with large amount of objects in the same session:

• NH is relatively slow because of its materialization pipeline. I'm not fully sure why, but e.g. to implement dirty checking, NH must store a clone of any materialized objects somewhere. At least two times more RAM ~= at least 2 times slower.
• LLBLGen uses relatively "fat" entities - it seems they store fields in dictionaries. Obviously, this isn't good from the point of performance, since RAM consumption is one of essential factors affecting on it.

See this FAQ question and Test Suite Summary for a bit deeper explanation.

So in short, LLBLGen Pro must be faster than NH on reads, but slower on writes.

Answer 2

Your question is essentially impossible to answer without context. The questions I would ask in response would start with:

• What kind of application? Data-centric? Business logic-centric?
• How much data are we talking about?
• What kind of data operations are we talking about? Mostly reads? Mostly writes?

As a general matter, LLBLGen performs very well. We have used it on 10+ projects (including a few enterprise-scale projects) where I work, and the few issues we've seen with performance were always the result of misunderstand what the code was doing (there is a learning curve) or a poorly implemented physical model (e.g. missing indexes).

The two frameworks approach the problem of data access very differently. LLBLGen's operations generally translate into SQL that is fairly easy to understand if you have a strong data background. NHibernate uses sessions and cache to keep data in memory when possible to improve performance (disclaimer: I am not an NHibernate expert). LLBLGen does not support this sort of concept; instead it works in a disconnected state and stores change tracking information directly on its entity objects.

Bottom line, the approaches the frameworks take are very different, and it's hard to predict which will perform better without knowing more about what your system does. In the right hands, either framework can be used to design a system where data access performance is not a major performance bottleneck.