Structs versus classes

Solution 1:

Is it faster to create these objects as class or as struct?

You are the only person who can determine the answer to that question. Try it both ways, measure a meaningful, user-focused, relevant performance metric, and then you'll know whether the change has a meaningful effect on real users in relevant scenarios.

Structs consume less heap memory (because they are smaller and more easily compacted, not because they are "on the stack"). But they take longer to copy than a reference copy. I don't know what your performance metrics are for memory usage or speed; there's a tradeoff here and you're the person who knows what it is.

Is it better to create these objects as class or as struct?

Maybe class, maybe struct. As a rule of thumb: If the object is :
1. Small
2. Logically an immutable value
3. There's a lot of them
Then I'd consider making it a struct. Otherwise I'd stick with a reference type.

If you need to mutate some field of a struct it is usually better to build a constructor that returns an entire new struct with the field set correctly. That's perhaps slightly slower (measure it!) but logically much easier to reason about.

Are objects on the heap and the stack processed equally by the garbage collector?

No, they are not the same because objects on the stack are the roots of the collection. The garbage collector does not need to ever ask "is this thing on the stack alive?" because the answer to that question is always "Yes, it's on the stack". (Now, you can't rely on that to keep an object alive because the stack is an implementation detail. The jitter is allowed to introduce optimizations that, say, enregister what would normally be a stack value, and then it's never on the stack so the GC doesn't know that it is still alive. An enregistered object can have its descendents collected aggressively, as soon as the register holding onto it is not going to be read again.)

But the garbage collector does have to treat objects on the stack as alive, the same way that it treats any object known to be alive as alive. The object on the stack can refer to heap-allocated objects that need to be kept alive, so the GC has to treat stack objects like living heap-allocated objects for the purposes of determining the live set. But obviously they are not treated as "live objects" for the purposes of compacting the heap, because they're not on the heap in the first place.

Is that clear?

Solution 2:

Sometimes with struct you don't need to call the new() constructor, and directly assign the fields making it much faster that usual.

Example:

Value[] list = new Value[N];
for (int i = 0; i < N; i++)
{
    list[i].id = i;
    list[i].isValid = true;
}

is about 2 to 3 times faster than

Value[] list = new Value[N];
for (int i = 0; i < N; i++)
{
    list[i] = new Value(i, true);
}

where Value is a struct with two fields (id and isValid).

struct Value
{
    int id;
    bool isValid;

    public Value(int i, bool isValid)
    {
        this.i = i;
        this.isValid = isValid;
    }
}

On the other hand is the items needs to be moved or selected value types all that copying is going to slow you down. To get the exact answer I suspect you have to profile your code and test it out.

Solution 3:

Structs may seem similar to classes, but there are important differences that you should be aware of. First of all, classes are reference types and structs are value types. By using structs, you can create objects that behave like the built-in types and enjoy their benefits as well.

When you call the New operator on a class, it will be allocated on the heap. However, when you instantiate a struct, it gets created on the stack. This will yield performance gains. Also, you will not be dealing with references to an instance of a struct as you would with classes. You will be working directly with the struct instance. Because of this, when passing a struct to a method, it's passed by value instead of as a reference.

More here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa288471(VS.71).aspx