How expensive is exception throwing in .NET 9?

The post compares try-catch usage in .NET 9 with and without thrown exceptions. It says the try-catch block itself has nearly identical execution time to code without it, but throwing and catching an exception still adds cost in time and memory.

Reading notes

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• The benchmark used a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, BenchmarkDotNet v0.14.0, Windows 11, and .NET SDK 9.0.101.
• TryCatch_NoError and NoTryCatch_NoError had nearly the same mean time and allocation.
• TryCatch_WithErrorOption was also close to the no-error cases.
• TryCatch_WithThrow was slower and allocated more memory than the other methods.
• The post reports about 0.002 milliseconds of overhead and 320 additional bytes when throwing and catching an exception.
• The conclusion says the overhead is minimal in most cases.
• It also says the cost can be greater in a large code base or on limited hardware.
• The post says it is still beneficial to reserve exceptions for truly exceptional situations.
• It also says the choice should be weighed against the developer time needed for graceful error handling.