Timing Results

Integer Speed projects	These projects show the speed differences between the data types Variant, Integer, and Long. There is a relatively large difference in the speed of Variants when running interpreted p-code inside the Visual Basic IDE. But there is a HUGE difference when running variants using compiled native code as a stand-alone EXE file. Here are the timing results for the Version 4 compiled program. I clicked on the "Run All 3" button three times, and waited for all the loops to finish executing before clicking again. I discarded the first of the three sets of results, because they were usually slower than the subsequent results. I then averaged the other two sets of results to produce the values shown below.
Windows 98 Visual Basic 5.0	300 Mhz Pentium II, using Int Speed 4 VB5.exe
	Long	0.12 seconds
	Integer	0.26 seconds, 2.1 times slower than Long
	Variant	3.08 seconds, 24.8 times slower than Long
Windows 98 Visual Basic 6.0	300 Mhz Pentium II, using Int Speed 4 VB6.exe
	Long	0.13 seconds
	Integer	0.26 seconds, 2.1 times slower than Long
	Variant	3.36 seconds, 26.8 times slower than Long
Windows NT 4	When I ran these projects under Windows NT Server 4.0, they acted differently. When I clicked the button for "Run All 3", the screen did not repaint until after ALL three loops had finished. This certainly looked a bit strange, but the timing results for the compiled program were similar to those shown above.
Windows NT 4 Visual Basic 6.0	450 Mhz Pentium II, using Int Speed 4 VB6.exe
	Long	0.08 seconds
	Integer	0.17 seconds, 2.1 times slower than Long
	Variant	2.21 seconds, 27.6 times slower than Long
Conclusions	There are certain rare cases in which you MUST use variant data types. Clearly, you should avoid them because your programs will run slower if you use them. Note that Longs are faster than Integers. Because the code is running under a 32 bit operating system, the code is more efficient at manipulating Longs, which occupy 32 bits (4 bytes of 8 bits each). Under 16 bit Windows, the results would be faster for Integers, since they occupy 16 bits (2 bytes of 8 bits each).