NHibernate,Entity Model or LightSpeed which is preferable?

Question

Can any one tell which is best suited for performance oriented applications?

Answer 1

All of the above. Or none of the above. No way to tell without measuring performance and seeing which one does or does not work for you.

Answer 2

I would agree with the existing answers here: Understand what performance really means to your application before going off half-cocked on something (most of us have been there). If you're looking for something super-performant but that still has some "ORMish" behavior and takes some monkey coding out of the ADO.Net equation, take a look at the various .Net MicroOrms out there such as:

• Dapper (with extensions)
• Service Stack's ORM Lite
• Insight.Database
• Massive

There are several others out there, some of which are referenced from the dapper site.

If you really are stuck with those three choices, it definitely does depend on a lot of factors and how much time you spend tuning. That being said, I've used all three quite a bit, especially NHib 2-3 and EF 4-6. I think if you are doing just quick-and-dirty coding without spending a lot of time on optimizing, LightSpeed is a really good choice and I've personally found it to outperform the other two very handily when it comes to most basic CRUD operations and LINQ queries.

The big downside of LightSpeed is that you have to inherit from their base classes. This is somewhat mitigated by partial class support and you can also insert your own base classes in between, and there's also no true "CodeFirst" support, although you can handcode the classes and skip the designer if you like. They all work well if tuned properly. Just pick the right tool for the job.

Whichever you chose, use your SQL Profiler / Mini Profiler / NHProf / EFProf etc...