There are a few situations where a C# structure will provided better performance than a C# class and other times a class will be faster than a structure. The reason for this is how C# is handling both of these in memory during program execution.

Let’s talk about classes first. A class in C# is a reference type. This means that C# creates references, or pointers, to values in memory for each part of the object. When you copy a C# class you are making a copy of the references to values in memory. Structures have a different behavior than this.

Structures behave like a value type much like an int or a bool. These types are based on values in memory directly, there are no pointers or references in between. These types are said to run on the metal since they do not use references.

Knowing these two bits of crucial information, you can modify some class objects into structures and gain a good performance boost. However, you must make these decisions carefully since a bad implementation of structure will actually cause slower performance. Thankfully we have MSDN to show us a few guidelines on structure uses:

✓ CONSIDER defining a struct instead of a class if instances of the type are small and commonly short-lived or are commonly embedded in other objects.

X AVOID defining a struct unless the type has all of the following characteristics:

• It logically represents a single value, similar to primitive types (int, double, etc.).
• It has an instance size under 16 bytes.
• It is immutable.
• It will not have to be boxed frequently.

In all other cases, you should define your types as classes.

Source: MSDN

All of those points make sense. If something is going to be a structure it should represent a single value (like the other primitive types), it has a small memory footprint, it is immutable (again like the other primitive types), and will not be boxed/unboxed a lot inside other portions of your program. If you cannot meet these key requirements, you should be using a class instead of a structure.

The next time you think you can represent a chunk of information as a structure, you should take a moment and check the requirements. If you do not check for these key points, then your performance will suffer down the road as your application scales out.