Hey guys and gals, I have a quick question for you... Which is faster performance-wise, using ZeroMemory() to zero out a struct in my CPP program, or simply assigning 'zero' and 'NULL' to each element of the struct? This struct has about 30 elements to it, including characters, numbers, and other smaller structs. Thanks in advance for the info!

My uneducated guess is that ZeroMemory() (which I'm pretty sure is a macro for memset()) would be just as fast or faster (but probably barely) than individually setting the items to zero. My thought process goes like this: memset() just works on a contiguous block of memory; it doesn't care what it is. So it just does a for-loop to set each element to zero. I'm first of all assuming that it is able to use the word size of the machine it is on, typically 32-bit chunks, rather than merely doing everything in bytes. This I'm guessing would cut down on bit-shifts/bit-masks and such to isolate and set individual bytes. Secondly, I'm assuming that the compiler will be able to unroll the loop, so that it doesn't really need to do the variable incrementing. Then again, I don't know how capable the loop unrolling is. I only know enough about these technicalities to get by. It'd be a fun item to research though, I'm sure, for either of us.

If you manually set individual items, then unless all the items are precisely integer-multiples of the size of the machine-word, you might have a minor performance hit, as it needs to do a few bit-shifts/bit-masks as I mentioned above to set each item. But it is already unrolled and there isn't any loop incrementing occurring. All the memory address offsets are already calculated. Which can probably also be done in the above case, but I can't guarantee that.

Lastly, I doubt it matters. Write your program first. If you have a problem with performance, profile it. If the profiler says that this is a chunk of code that is run frequently and takes up time, try both methods to see which works best. It's not a major thing that'll take days to rewrite; it's a small code change that is pretty quick to test.

Why not actually try it out instead of relying on the admitted guesses of others? It's not exactly difficult or time consuming to write a small app that does each one in a loop a few million times.

It also probably doesn't really matter. Do whichever way you think is easier to understand.

By the way, calling ZeroMemory on C++ objects can be a bad thing. Particularly if the class contains virtual functions. It's fine for the so-called "plain old data" types but be careful.

Hehehe, can anyone say "NULLed V-Table"? [grin]

Setting aside the POD issue, I think it depends on the size of struct and the kind of member types. Off hand I would guess that for structs less than 16 bytes in size it would be faster to zero each member. Above that size the advantage would go to ZeroMemory/memset.

Quote:Original post by krum
ZeroMemory will almost certainly be faster. The C++ compiler knows about this function and will even optimize it completely out if it can.

I wrote a SIMD zero-memory filler and it was only marginally faster than ZeroMemory across a large block of memory.

That's because you didn't do it right ;) You need to strip or line the cache properly.

However how often do you need to memset multi-megabyte arrays? 99.999% of the time memset, zeromemory, or a rep stos is fast enough.