HOWTO: Improve String Concatenation Performance

ID: Q170964

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Visual Basic Control Creation, Learning, Professional, and Enterprise Editions for Windows, version 5.0
Microsoft Visual Basic Standard, Professional, and Enterprise Editions, 16-bit and 32-bit, for Windows, version 4.0
Microsoft Visual Basic Standard and Professional Editions for Windows, version 3.0
Microsoft Access versions 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 7.0, 97
Microsoft Excel for Windows 95, version 7.0
Microsoft Excel 97 for Windows
Microsoft Word 97 for Windows

SUMMARY

When concatenating large strings on the order of 50kb or larger (for example, building an HTML table from a database), the length of time to complete can become quite long as the string gets larger. This article demonstrates an alternative to normal concatenation that can improve performance for large strings by 20 times or more.

MORE INFORMATION

When performing repeated concatenations of the type:

   For I = 1 To N
     Dest = Dest & Source
   Next N

the length of time increases proportionally to N-squared. Thus, 1000 iterations will take about 100 times longer than 100 iterations. This is because Visual Basic does not just add the Source characters to the end of the Dest string; it also performs the following operations:

1. Allocates temporary memory large enough to hold the result.

2. Copies Dest to the start of the temporary area.

3. Copies Source to the end of the temporary area.

4. De-allocates the old copy of Dest.

5. Allocates memory for Dest large enough to hold the result.

6. Copies the temporary data to Dest.

Steps 2 and 6 are very expensive and basically result in the entire concatenated result being copied twice with additional overhead to allocate and de-allocate memory.

This article details a method using the Mid$ statement and pre-allocating memory in larger chunks to eliminate all but step 3 above for most of the concatenation phase.

WARNING: ANY USE BY YOU OF THE CODE PROVIDED IN THIS ARTICLE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. Microsoft provides this code "as is" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.

Step-by-Step Example

1. Type the following code into a module:

      Option Explicit

      ' For 16-bit products, uncomment the next three lines by removing the
      ' single quotes and add a single quote to comment out the following
      ' three lines.
      '  Const ConcatStr = "ABC"
      '  Const ccIncrement = 15000
      '  Declare Function GetTickCount Lib "USER" () As Long

         Const ConcatStr = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"
         Const ccIncrement = 50000
         Private Declare Function GetTickCount Lib "KERNEL32" () As Long

      Dim ccOffset As Long

      Sub StdConcat(ByVal LoopCount As Long)
      Dim BigStr As String, I As Long, StartTick As Long
        StartTick = GetTickCount()
        For I = 1 To LoopCount
          BigStr = BigStr & ConcatStr
        Next I
        Debug.Print LoopCount; "concatenations took";
        Debug.Print GetTickCount() - StartTick; "ticks"
      End Sub

      Sub Test_Concat()
        Debug.Print "Using standard concatenation"
        StdConcat 1000
        StdConcat 2000
        StdConcat 3000
        StdConcat 4000
        StdConcat 5000
        Debug.Print
        Debug.Print "Using pre-allocated storage and pseudo-concatenation"
        MidConcat 1000
        MidConcat 2000
        MidConcat 3000
        MidConcat 4000
        MidConcat 5000
      End Sub

      Sub Concat(Dest As String, Source As String)
      Dim L As Long
        L = Len(Source)
        If (ccOffset + L) >= Len(Dest) Then
          If L > ccIncrement Then
            Dest = Dest & Space$(L)
          Else
            Dest = Dest & Space$(ccIncrement)
          End If
        End If
        Mid$(Dest, ccOffset + 1, L) = Source
        ccOffset = ccOffset + L
      End Sub

      Sub MidConcat(ByVal LoopCount As Long)
      Dim BigStr As String, I As Long, StartTick As Long
        StartTick = GetTickCount()
        ccOffset = 0
        For I = 1 To LoopCount
          Concat BigStr, ConcatStr
        Next I
        BigStr = Left$(BigStr, ccOffset)
        Debug.Print LoopCount; "pseudo-concatenations took";
        Debug.Print GetTickCount() - StartTick; "ticks"
      End Sub

2. In the Debug/Immediate Window, type "Test_Concat" without the quotes,

   and hit the Enter key.

   The results will look similar to:

      Using standard concatenation
       1000 concatenations took 2348 ticks
       2000 concatenations took 8954 ticks
       3000 concatenations took 20271 ticks
       4000 concatenations took 35103 ticks
       5000 concatenations took 54453 ticks

      Using pre-allocated storage and pseudo-concatenation
       1000 pseudo-concatenations took 82 ticks
       2000 pseudo-concatenations took 124 ticks
       3000 pseudo-concatenations took 165 ticks
       4000 pseudo-concatenations took 247 ticks
       5000 pseudo-concatenations took 289 ticks

Additional Information

1. The code may take a couple of minutes to run.

2. GetTickCount returns the number of milliseconds since Windows

   was started. Thus, the output is in milliseconds.

3. Performance improvement ranges from almost 30 times for the

   1000-iteration case to almost 200 times for the 5000-iteration case.
   These times may vary depending on:

    - The product used.
    - Your system configuration..
    - The size of ccIncrement (larger size favors MidConcat).
    - The number of iterations used (more iterations favors MidConcat).
    - The size of the resultant string (larger size favors MidConcat).

Keywords          : kbprg kbVBp400 kbVBp500 kbhowto VB4WIN VBKBVBA vbwin 
Version           : WINDOWS:1.0 1.1 2.0 3.0 4.0 5.0 7.0
Platform          : WINDOWS
Issue type        : kbhowto

Last Reviewed: October 1, 1997