Saving a Dictionary in C# - Serialization?

Question

I am writing a C# application that needs to read about 130,000 (String, Int32) pairs at startup to a Dictionary. The pairs are stored in a .txt file, and are thus easily mod

Answer 1

Encryption comes at the cost of key management. And, of course, even the fastest encryption/decryption algorithms are slower than no encryption at all. Same with compression, which will only help if you are I/O-bound.

If performance is your main concern, start looking at where the bottleneck actually is. If the culprit really is the Convert.ToInt32() call, I imagine you can store the Int32 bits directly and get away with a simple cast, which should be faster than parsing a string value. To obfuscate the strings, you can xor each byte with some fixed value, which is fast but provides nothing more than a roadbump for a determined attacker.