I'm just beginning to evaluate mocking frameworks for my team and am wondering if anyone has any pointers to reference documentation or experience that you can share regarding the cost of mocking when doing performance tests.
Links? Personal experience? Details appreciated.
I have been testing mocking frameworks (Moq and TypeMock specifically). TypeMock is much more powerful and flexible but because it plugs into the framework as a profiler it really does have a signficant impact on performance.
My conclusion is that TypeMock is an excellent tool for non-load test scenarios. Moq is less flexible... but much lighter weight and does not have a broad effect on general performance. With Moq you have to setup your applications specifically to be able to mock out the external dependencies (an excercise in good design anyway) but has proven to be a much better fit for my load related scenarios.
Unfortunately I did not record actual numbers in my tests regarding Moq vs TypeMock but the performance benefit of Moq is signficant in my experience.