I recently ran into a situation where I was tasked to profile some .NET code and do some optimizations anywhere hot spots popped up. I was amazed to find out that one of the BIGGEST offenders in our code block was a simple call to StringBuilder.Append(char). I had to take a step back and scratch my head and wonder if my profiler was confused.

I re-ran some tests using the StopWatch class to hard code some metrics into the application and they also confirmed the findings. What’s up? How could a class that everyone says you can use to your hearts content when it came to string concatenation was failing me?

Turns out, it was a mix of misuse and a common misconception about the StringBuilder Class.

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