Dictionary VS Hash Table

We all know how useful a hash table can be, but if you are using the .NET Framework 2.0 you should be using a Dictionary instead. A dictionary and a hash table in .NET 2.0 are very similar but with 1 main difference, a dictionary is faster because it does not need to box and unbox the data as a hash table would.

I made a simple program to see just how much faster a dictionary is than a hash table. I ran the test 20 times for each data set and the results were close each time. A GUID as the key and a boolean as the data.

This is the results of the last test for each dataset.

Time in Milliseconds for 100,000 keys	Dictionary	Hash Table
Inserting	34.41264	76.0970
Reading	18.9005	31.1648
Deleting	21.2474	30.4655

 

Time in Seconds for 10,000,000 keys	Dictionary	Hash Table
Inserting	6.5704143	26.9096540
Reading	3.1362891	5.6670613
Deleting	3.4623316	4.8830676