Entity Framework VS Stored Procedure (What Is important - Development Time Or Performance)

In an existing system application which I am working on, we need to decide whether we should use entity framework or stored procedure to optimize the performance of our application.

I am not a big fan of Entity Framework but still, I know some of its good features.

Entity Framework uses LINQ which provides a fantastic feature to the developers, like – compile type error checking, IntelliSense at development time, common queries across the databases etc. All these features provide quick development turnaround time.

However, I was not sure whether it provides good performance in comparison to the stored procedure or not. So, I developed a simple console application to compare the results.

I did the same operation once by using EF and the second time with a stored procedure and noted the execution time both times.

Below is my console application followed by the result.

class Program
   {
       static void Main(string[] args)
       {
           int queries = 500;
           Stopwatch spStopwatch = new Stopwatch();
          //stored procedure code
           spStopwatch.Start();
    for (int i = 0; i < queries; i++)
           {
               using (var sqlConn = new SqlConnection("Data Source=NJO-LPT-GJAIN;Initial Catalog=BookDb;Integrated Security=True"))
               {
                   var cmd = new SqlCommand("searchBook", sqlConn) { CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure };
                   cmd.Parameters.AddWithValue("@Bookname", "java");
                  sqlConn.Open();
                   SqlDataReader dr = cmd.ExecuteReader();
                   List<book> books = new List<book>();
                   while (dr.Read())
                   {
                       books.Add(new book { BookTitle = dr.GetString(0) });
                   }
                   sqlConn.Close();
               }
           }
           spStopwatch.Stop();
           Console.WriteLine("Time taken by SP " + spStopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds);
             //Entity framework code
           var context = new BookDbEntities();
           var bookset = context.Set<Book>();
           spStopwatch.Start();
           for (int i = 0; i < queries; i++)
           {
               Book books = bookset.Where(x => x.BookTitle == "java").First();
           }
          spStopwatch.Stop();
           Console.WriteLine("Time taken by EF " + spStopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds);
          Console.ReadLine();
       }
   }
   class book
   {
       public string BookTitle;
   }
}

 

I executed the same application at least 10 times and every time, the time taken by Entity Framework is almost 3-4 times more than the time taken by a stored procedure.

My opinion is that Entity Framework provides a very good feature but can’t beat the performance of the stored procedure because of its precompiled nature.

Please let me know if you have a different opinion.