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Why is using a pointer for a for loop more performant in this case?

I don't have a background in C/C++ or related lower-level languages and so I've never ran into pointers before. I'm a game dev working primarily in C# and I finally decided to move to an unsafe context this morning for some performance-critical sections of code (and please no "don't use unsafe" answers as I've read so many times while doing research, as it's already yielding me around 6 times the performance in certain areas, with no issues so far, plus I love the ability to do stuff like reverse arrays with no allocation). Anyhow, there's a certain situation where I expected no difference, or even a possible decrease in speed, and I'm saving a lot of ticks in reality (I'm talking about double the speed in some instances). This benefit seems to decrease with the number of iterations, which I don't fully understand.
This is the situation:
int x = 0;
for(int i = 0; i < 100; i++)
x++;
Takes, on average about 15 ticks.
EDIT: The following is unsafe code, though I assumed that was a given.
int x = 0, i = 0;
int* i_ptr;
for(i_ptr = &i; *i_ptr < 100; (*i_ptr)++)
x++;
Takes about 7 ticks, on average.
As I mentioned, I don't have a low-level background and I literally just started using pointers this morning, at least directly, so I'm probably missing quite a bit of info. So my first query is- why is the pointer more performant in this case? It isn't an isolated instance, and there are a lot of other variables of course, at that specific point in time in relation to the PC, but I'm getting these results very consistently across a lot of tests.
In my head, the operations are as such:
No pointer:
Get address of i
Get value at address
Pointer:
Get address of i_ptr
Get address of i from i_ptr
Get value at address
In my head, there must surely be more overhead, however ridiculously negligible, from using a pointer here. How is it that a pointer is consistently more performant than the direct variable in this case? These are all on the stack as well, of course, so it's not dependent on where they end up being stored, from what I can tell.
As touched on earlier, the caveat is that this bonus decreases with the number of iterations, and pretty fast. I took out the extremes from the following data to account for background interference.
At 1000 iterations, they are both identical at 30 to 34 ticks.
At 10000 iterations, the pointer is slower by about 20 ticks.
Jump up to 10000000 iterations, and the pointer is slower by about 10000 ticks or so.
My assumption is that the decrease comes from the extra step I covered earlier, given that there is an additional lookup, which brings me back to wonder why it's more performant with a pointer than without at low loop counts. At the very least, I'd assume they would be more or less identical (which they are in practice, I suppose, but a difference of 8 ticks from millions of repeated tests is pretty definitive to me) up until the very rough threshold I found somewhere between 100 and 1000 iterations.
Apologies if I'm nitpicking somewhat, or if this is a poor question, but I feel as though it will be beneficial to know exactly what is going on under the hood. And if nothing else, I think it's pretty interesting!

Some users suggested that the test results were most likely due to measurement inaccuracies, and it would seem as such, at least upto a point. When averaged across ten million continuous tests, the mean of both is typically equal, though in some cases the use of pointers averages out to an extra tick. Interestingly, when testing as a single case, the use of pointers has a consistently lower execution time than without. There are of course a lot of additional variables at play at the specific points in time at which a test is tried, which makes it somewhat of a pointless pursuit to track this down any further. But the result is that I've learned some more about pointers, which was my primary goal, and so I'm pleased with the test.

Performance and Memory Consumption in C#

I have two question:
1) I need some expert view in terms of witting code which will be Performance and Memory Consumption wise sound enough.
2) Performance and Memory Consumption wise how good/bad is following piece of code and why ???
Need to increment the counter that could go maximum by 100 and writing code like this:
Some Sample Code is as follows:
for(int i=0;i=100;i++)
{
Some Code
}
for(long i=0;i=1000;i++)
{
Some Code
}
how good is to use Int16 or anything else instead of int, long if the requirement is same.

Need to increment the counter that could go maximum by 100 and writing code like this:
Options given:
for(int i=0;i=100;i++)
for(long i=0;i=1000;i++)
EDIT: As noted, neither of these would even actually compile, due to the middle expression being an assignment rather than an expression of type bool.
This demonstrates a hugely important point: get your code working before you make it fast. Your two loops don't do the same thing - one has an upper bound of 1000, the other has an upper bound of 100. If you have to choose between "fast" and "correct", you almost always want to pick "correct". (There are exceptions to this, of course - but that's usually in terms of absolute correctness of results across large amounts of data, not code correctness.)
Changing between the variable types here is unlikely to make any measurable difference. That's often the case with micro-optimizations. When it comes to performance, architecture is usually much more important than in-method optimizations - and it's also a lot harder to change later on. In general, you should:
Write the cleanest code you can, using types that represent your data most correctly and simply
Determine reasonable performance requirements
Measure your clean implementation
If it doesn't perform well enough, use profiling etc to work out how to improve it

DateTime dtStart = DateTime.Now;
for(int i=0;i=10000;i++)
{
Some Code
}
response.write ((DateTime.Now - dtStart).TotalMilliseconds.ToString());
same way for Long as well and you can know which one is better... ;)

When you are doing things that require a number representing iterations, or the quantity of something, you should always use int unless you have a good semantic reason to use a different type (ie data can never be negative, or it could be bigger than 2^31). Additionally, Worrying about this sort of nano-optimization concern will basically never matter when writing c# code.
That being said, if you are wondering about the differences between things like this (incrementing a 4 byte register versus incrementing 8 bytes), you can always cosult Mr. Agner's wonderful instruction tables.
On an Amd64 machine, incrementing long takes the same amount of time as incrementing int.**
On a 32 bit x86 machine, incrementing int will take less time.
** The same is true for almost all logic and math operations, as long as the value is not both memory bound and unaligned. In .NET a long will always be aligned, so the two will always be the same.

Are C# Strings (and other .NET API's) limited to 2GB in size?

Today I noticed that C#'s String class returns the length of a string as an Int. Since an Int is always 32-bits, no matter what the architecture, does this mean that a string can only be 2GB or less in length?
A 2GB string would be very unusual, and present many problems along with it. However, most .NET api's seem to use 'int' to convey values such as length and count. Does this mean we are forever limited to collection sizes which fit in 32-bits?
Seems like a fundamental problem with the .NET API's. I would have expected things like count and length to be returned via the equivalent of 'size_t'.

Seems like a fundamental problem with
the .NET API...
I don't know if I'd go that far.
Consider almost any collection class in .NET. Chances are it has a Count property that returns an int. So this suggests the class is bounded at a size of int.MaxValue (2147483647). That's not really a problem; it's a limitation -- and a perfectly reasonable one, in the vast majority of scenarios.
Anyway, what would the alternative be? There's uint -- but that's not CLS-compliant. Then there's long...
What if Length returned a long?
An additional 32 bits of memory would be required anywhere you wanted to know the length of a string.
The benefit would be: we could have strings taking up billions of gigabytes of RAM. Hooray.
Try to imagine the mind-boggling cost of some code like this:
// Lord knows how many characters
string ulysses = GetUlyssesText();
// allocate an entirely new string of roughly equivalent size
string schmulysses = ulysses.Replace("Ulysses", "Schmulysses");
Basically, if you're thinking of string as a data structure meant to store an unlimited quantity of text, you've got unrealistic expectations. When it comes to objects of this size, it becomes questionable whether you have any need to hold them in memory at all (as opposed to hard disk).

Correct, the maximum length would be the size of Int32, however you'll likely run into other memory issues if you're dealing with strings larger than that anyway.

At some value of String.length() probably about 5MB its not really practical to use String anymore. String is optimised for short bits of text.
Think about what happens when you do
msString += " more chars"
Something like:
System calculates length of myString plus length of " more chars"
System allocates that amount of memory
System copies myString to new memory location
System copies " more chars" to new memory location after last copied myString char
The original myString is left to the mercy of the garbage collector.
While this is nice and neat for small bits of text its a nightmare for large strings, just finding 2GB of contiguous memory is probably a showstopper.
So if you know you are handling more than a very few MB of characters use one of the *Buffer classes.

It's pretty unlikely that you'll need to store more than two billion objects in a single collection. You're going to incur some pretty serious performance penalties when doing enumerations and lookups, which are the two primary purposes of collections. If you're dealing with a data set that large, There is almost assuredly some other route you can take, such as splitting up your single collection into many smaller collections that contain portions of the entire set of data you're working with.
Heeeey, wait a sec.... we already have this concept -- it's called a dictionary!
If you need to store, say, 5 billion English strings, use this type:
Dictionary<string, List<string>> bigStringContainer;
Let's make the key string represent, say, the first two characters of the string. Then write an extension method like this:
public static string BigStringIndex(this string s)
{
return String.Concat(s[0], s[1]);
}
and then add items to bigStringContainer like this:
bigStringContainer[item.BigStringIndex()].Add(item);
and call it a day. (There are obviously more efficient ways you could do that, but this is just an example)
Oh, and if you really really really do need to be able to look up any arbitrary object by absolute index, use an Array instead of a collection. Okay yeah, you use some type safety, but you can index array elements with a long.

The fact that the framework uses Int32 for Count/Length properties, indexers etc is a bit of a red herring. The real problem is that the CLR currently has a max object size restriction of 2GB.
So a string -- or any other single object -- can never be larger than 2GB.
Changing the Length property of the string type to return long, ulong or even BigInteger would be pointless since you could never have more than approx 2^30 characters anyway (2GB max size and 2 bytes per character.)
Similarly, because of the 2GB limit, the only arrays that could even approach having 2^31 elements would be bool[] or byte[] arrays that only use 1 byte per element.
Of course, there's nothing to stop you creating your own composite types to workaround the 2GB restriction.
(Note that the above observations apply to Microsoft's current implementation, and could very well change in future releases. I'm not sure whether Mono has similar limits.)

In versions of .NET prior to 4.5, the maximum object size is 2GB. From 4.5 onwards you can allocate larger objects if gcAllowVeryLargeObjects is enabled. Note that the limit for string is not affected, but "arrays" should cover "lists" too, since lists are backed by arrays.

Even in x64 versions of Windows I got hit by .Net limiting each object to 2GB.
2GB is pretty small for a medical image. 2GB is even small for a Visual Studio download image.

If you are working with a file that is 2GB, that means you're likely going to be using a lot of RAM, and you're seeing very slow performance.
Instead, for very large files, consider using a MemoryMappedFile (see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.memorymappedfiles.memorymappedfile.aspx). Using this method, you can work with a file of nearly unlimited size, without having to load the whole thing in memory.

What is the fastest way to copy my array?

I'm doing some Wave file handling and have them read from disk into an array of bytes. I want to quickly copy portions from this byte array into another buffer for intermediate processing. Currently I use something like this:
float[] fin;
byte[] buf;
//fill buf code omitted
for(int i=offset; i < size; i++){
fin[i-offset] = (float) buf[i];
}
I feel that this is a slow method, because there is as much computation going on in the for loop conditional and increment as there is over in the actual body. If there was a block copy avaliable in C# or some other way I can implement a block copy, that would be great.
Maybe it isn't too slow, but it sure looks like a lot of work to move some data over. Here "size" is between 2^10 and 2^14. I am then handing the "fin" off to a FFT library, so this is by no means the slowest part of the code, maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.
EDIT UPDATE:
I realize that micro optimizations are not where someone should spend their time, and I realize that profiling is a better way to achieve speedups overall, but I know that this code is in a 'hot path' and must be completed in under a third of a second on varying end user architectures to minimize our hardware system requirements. Even though I know that the following FFT code will be much more time consuming, I am looking for speedups where I can get them.
Array.Copy sure looks nice, I didn't know about that before, and I consider this Q&A a success already!

There is also:
Array.Copy
Array.CopyTo
but whether these will be faster will require profiling.
But be warned about focusing on micro-optimisations to the extent you miss the big picture, on modern PCs the effect of multi-level memory caching is likely to be greater than one approach or another to the copy.
Edit: Quick check in reflector: both of the above methods boil down to a common native implementation (good).
Note the docs for Array.Copy cover valid type conversions, a value -> value widening conversion like byte to float should be OK.

Have a look at Array.Copy it should be faster

Since you are converting from byte to float you are not going to get any significant speedup. No Array.Copy or variation of memcopy can cope with that.
The only possible gain would be to 'poke' the byte value into a float. I don't know enough (about the implementation of float) to know if it will work and I honestly don't want to know either.

I won't reference knuth but profile your code. Put some timestamps in and measure how long things are taking. Then you can spend your time in optimization well :)

.NET Integer vs Int16?

I have a questionable coding practice.
When I need to iterate through a small list of items whose count limit is under 32000, I use Int16 for my i variable type instead of Integer. I do this because I assume using the Int16 is more efficient than a full blown Integer.
Am I wrong? Is there no effective performance difference between using an Int16 vs an Integer? Should I stop using Int16 and just stick with Integer for all my counting/iteration needs?

You should almost always use Int32 or Int64 (and, no, you do not get credit by using UInt32 or UInt64) when looping over an array or collection by index.
The most obvious reason that it's less efficient is that all array and collection indexes found in the BCL take Int32s, so an implicit cast is always going to happen in code that tries to use Int16s as an index.
The less-obvious reason (and the reason that arrays take Int32 as an index) is that the CIL specification says that all operation-stack values are either Int32 or Int64. Every time you either load or store a value to any other integer type (Byte, SByte, UInt16, Int16, UInt32, or UInt64), there is an implicit conversion operation involved. Unsigned types have no penalty for loading, but for storing the value, this amounts to a truncation and a possible overflow check. For the signed types every load sign-extends, and every store sign-collapses (and has a possible overflow check).
The place that this is going to hurt you most is the loop itself, not the array accesses. For example take this innocent-looking loop:
for (short i = 0; i < 32000; i++) {
...
}
Looks good, right? Nope! You can basically ignore the initialization (short i = 0) since it only happens once, but the comparison (i<32000) and incrementing (i++) parts happen 32000 times. Here's some pesudo-code for what this thing looks like at the machine level:
Int16 i = 0;
LOOP:
Int32 temp0 = Convert_I16_To_I32(i); // !!!
if (temp0 >= 32000) goto END;
...
Int32 temp1 = Convert_I16_To_I32(i); // !!!
Int32 temp2 = temp1 + 1;
i = Convert_I32_To_I16(temp2); // !!!
goto LOOP;
END:
There are 3 conversions in there that are run 32000 times. And they could have been completely avoided by just using an Int32 or Int64.
Update: As I said in the comment, I have now, in fact written a blog post on this topic, .NET Integral Data Types And You

According to the below reference, the runtime optimizes performance of Int32 and recommends them for counters and other frequently accessed operations.
From the book: MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft® .NET Framework 2.0—Application Development Foundation
Chapter 1: "Framework Fundamentals"
Lesson 1: "Using Value Types"
Best Practices: Optimizing performance
with built-in types
The runtime optimizes the performance of 32-bit integer types (Int32 and UInt32), so use those types for counters and other frequently accessed integral variables.
For floating-point operations, Double is the most efficient type because those operations are optimized by hardware.
Also, Table 1-1 in the same section lists recommended uses for each type.
Relevant to this discussion:
Int16 - Interoperation and other specialized uses
Int32 - Whole numbers and counters
Int64 - Large whole numbers

Int16 may actually be less efficient because the x86 instructions for word access take up more space than the instructions for dword access. It will depend on what the JIT does. But no matter what, it's almost certainly not more efficient when used as the variable in an iteration.

The opposite is true.
32 (or 64) bit integers are faster than int16. In general the native datatype is the fastest one.
Int16 are nice if you want to make your data-structures as lean as possible. This saves space and may improve performance.

Never assume efficiency.
What is or isn't more efficient will vary from compiler to compiler and platform to platform. Unless you actually tested this, there is no way to tell whether int16 or int is more efficient.
I would just stick with ints unless you come across a proven performance problem that using int16 fixes.

Any performance difference is going to be so tiny on modern hardware that for all intents and purposes it'll make no difference. Try writing a couple of test harnesses and run them both a few hundred times, take the average loop completion times, and you'll see what I mean.
It might make sense from a storage perspective if you have very limited resources - embedded systems with a tiny stack, wire protocols designed for slow networks (e.g. GPRS etc), and so on.

Use Int32 on 32-bit machines (or Int64 on 64-bit machines) for fastest performance. Use a smaller integer type if you're really concerned about the space it takes up (may be slower, though).

The others here are correct, only use less than Int32 (for 32-bit code)/Int64 (for 64-bit code) if you need it for extreme storage requirements, or for another level of enforcement on a business object field (you should still have propery level validation in this case, of course).
And in general, don't worry about efficiency until there is a performance problem. And in that case, profile it. And if guess & checking with both ways while profiling doesn't help you enough, check the IL code.
Good question though. You're learning more about how the compiler does it's thing. If you want to learn to program more efficiently, learning the basics of IL and how the C#/VB compilers do their job would be a great idea.

I can't imagine there being any significant performance gain on Int16 vs. int.
You save some bits in the variable declaration.
And definitely not worth the hassle when the specs change and whatever you are counting can go above 32767 now and you discover that when your application starts throwing exceptions...

There is no significant performance gain in using a data type smaller than Int32, in fact, i read somewhere that using Int32 will be faster than Int16 because of memory allocation