Hi,

I am doing some benchmarking to determine if I can use WPF for a new product. However, early performance results are disappointing. I made a quick app that uses data binding to display a bunch of random text inside of a list box every 100 ms and it was eating up ~15% CPU. So I made another quick app that skipped the data binding/data template scheme and does nothing but update 10 TextBlocks that are inside of a ListBox every 100 ms (the actual product wouldn't require 100 ms updates, more like 500 ms max, but this is a stress test). I'm still seeing ~10-15% CPU usage. Why is this so high? Is it because of all the garbage strings?

Here's the XAML:

<Grid>
    <ListBox x:Name="numericsListBox">
        <ListBox.Resources>
            <Style TargetType="TextBlock">
                <Setter Property="FontSize" Value="48"/>
                <Setter Property="Width" Value="300"/>
            </Style>
        </ListBox.Resources>

        <TextBlock/>
        <TextBlock/>
        <TextBlock/>
        <TextBlock/>
        <TextBlock/>
        <TextBlock/>
        <TextBlock/>
        <TextBlock/>
        <TextBlock/>
        <TextBlock/>
    </ListBox>
</Grid>

Here's the code behind:

public partial class Window1 : Window
{
    private int _count = 0;

    public Window1()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
    }

    private void OnLoad(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
        var t = new DispatcherTimer(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.1), DispatcherPriority.Normal, UpdateNumerics, Dispatcher);
        t.Start();
    }

    private void UpdateNumerics(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        ++_count;
        foreach (object textBlock in numericsListBox.Items)
        {
            var t = textBlock as TextBlock;
            if (t != null)
                t.Text = _count.ToString();
        }
    }
}

Any ideas for a better way to quickly render text?

My computer: XP SP3, 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, Intel 4500 HD integrated graphics. And that is an order of magnitude beefier than the hardware I'd need to develop for in the real product.