How to avoid geometric slowdown with large Linq transactions?
- by Shaul
I've written some really nice, funky libraries for use in LinqToSql. (Some day when I have time to think about it I might make it open source... :) )
Anyway, I'm not sure if this is related to my libraries or not, but I've discovered that when I have a large number of changed objects in one transaction, and then call DataContext.GetChangeSet(), things start getting reaalllly slooowwwww. When I break into the code, I find that my program is spinning its wheels doing an awful lot of Equals() comparisons between the objects in the change set. I can't guarantee this is true, but I suspect that if there are n objects in the change set, then the call to GetChangeSet() is causing every object to be compared to every other object for equivalence, i.e. at best (n^2-n)/2 calls to Equals()...
Yes, of course I could commit each object separately, but that kinda defeats the purpose of transactions. And in the program I'm writing, I could have a batch job containing 100,000 separate items, that all need to be committed together. Around 5 billion comparisons there.
So the question is: (1) is my assessment of the situation correct? Do you get this behavior in pure, textbook LinqToSql, or is this something my libraries are doing? And (2) is there a standard/reasonable workaround so that I can create my batch without making the program geometrically slower with every extra object in the change set?