How it works

BenchmarkDotNet follows the following steps to run your benchmarks:

1. BenchmarkRunner generates an isolated project per each benchmark method/job/params and builds it in Release mode.
2. Next, we take each method/job/params combination and try to measure its performance by launching benchmark process several times (LaunchCount).
3. An invocation of the target method is an operation. A bunch of operation is an iteration. If you have a Setup method, it will be invoked before each iteration, but not between operations. We have the following type of iterations:
   • Pilot: The best operation count will be chosen.
   • IdleWarmup, IdleTarget: BenchmarkDotNet overhead will be evaluated.
   • MainWarmup: Warmup of the main method.
   • MainTarget: Main measurements.
   • Result = MainTarget - <AverageOverhead>
4. After all of the measurements, BenchmarkDotNet creates:
   • An instance of the Summary class that contains all information about benchmark runs.
   • A set of files that contains summary in human-readable and machine-readable formats.
   • A set of plots.