The Unity Application Block (Unity) is a lightweight extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection. It’s a great library for facilitating Inversion of Control and the recent version supports AOP as well. However, when it comes to performance, it’s CPU hungry. In fact it’s so CPU hungry that it makes it impossible to make it work at Internet Scale. I was investigating some CPU issue on a portal that gets around 3MM hits per day and I found unusually high CPU. Here’s why:

I did some CPU profiling on my open source project Dropthings and found that the highest CPU is consumed by Unity’s Resolve<>(). There’s no funky use of Unity in the project. Straightforward Register<>() and Resolve<>(). But as you can see, Resolve<>() is consuming significantly high CPU even after the site is warm and has been running for a while.

Then I tried Munq, which is a basic Dependency Injection Container. It has everything you will usually need in a regular project. It boasts to be the fastest DI out there. So, I converted all Unity code to Munq in Dropthings and did a CPU profile and Whala!

There’s no trace of any Munq calls anywhere. That proves Munq is a lot faster than Unity.