Do LINQ queries have a lot of overhead?

Question

Are simple LINQ queries on an IEnumerable lightweight or heavyweight? How do they compare to writing for or foreach loops by

Answer 1

About the only real performance overhead of LINQ-to-objects over doing it yourself are the few extra objects created to help with the enumeration and the function calls. In short, unless you use it in a way it wasn't designed to, it won't hurt your performance unless you're doing very high-perf stuff.

In that case, I'd implement it the LINQ way first, and let your performance testing tell you in which specific places you may need to consider doing it differently. For quite a bit of code, ease of maintenance trumps pure performance.