Benchmarks

Performance comparisons between MediatorLite and MediatR across four scenarios: simple request dispatch, single pipeline behavior, multiple pipeline behaviors, and notification publishing.

Last updated: 2026-07-16 — automated via CI.

Environment

BenchmarkDotNet v0.15.8, Linux Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS (Noble Numbat)
AMD EPYC 7763 2.45GHz, 1 CPU, 4 logical and 2 physical cores
.NET SDK 10.0.302
  [Host]     : .NET 10.0.10 (10.0.10, 10.0.1026.32716), X64 RyuJIT x86-64-v3
  Job-YFEFPZ : .NET 10.0.10 (10.0.10, 10.0.1026.32716), X64 RyuJIT x86-64-v3

IterationCount=10  WarmupCount=3

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Simple Request

Baseline scenario: a single request dispatched to a single handler with no pipeline behaviors.

Method	Mean	Error	StdDev	Ratio	Gen0	Allocated	Alloc Ratio
MediatR_SimpleRequest	113.62 ns	1.421 ns	0.940 ns	1.00	0.0196	328 B	1.00
MediatorLite_SimpleRequest	58.74 ns	1.016 ns	0.672 ns	0.52	0.0091	152 B	0.46

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Single Pipeline Behavior

Request dispatched through one open pipeline behavior (simulating a logging or tracing layer).

Method	Mean	Error	StdDev	Ratio	RatioSD	Gen0	Allocated	Alloc Ratio
MediatR_WithBehavior	220.2 ns	7.16 ns	4.74 ns	1.00	0.03	0.0381	640 B	1.00
MediatorLite_WithBehavior	120.2 ns	0.96 ns	0.57 ns	0.55	0.01	0.0167	280 B	0.44

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Multiple Pipeline Behaviors

Request dispatched through three behaviors (logging, validation, metrics) — a typical production pipeline.

Method	Mean	Error	StdDev	Ratio	Gen0	Allocated	Alloc Ratio
MediatR_WithMultipleBehaviors	345.3 ns	5.26 ns	3.13 ns	1.00	0.0639	1072 B	1.00
MediatorLite_WithMultipleBehaviors	279.6 ns	2.88 ns	1.90 ns	0.81	0.0291	488 B	0.46

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Notifications

A notification published to three handlers, comparing MediatR against MediatorLite’s Sequential and Parallel execution strategies.

Method	Mean	Error	StdDev	Ratio	RatioSD	Gen0	Allocated	Alloc Ratio
MediatR_Notification	199.3 ns	3.98 ns	2.63 ns	1.00	0.02	0.0367	616 B	1.00
MediatR_Parallel_Notification	309.0 ns	3.60 ns	2.38 ns	1.55	0.02	0.0582	976 B	1.58
MediatorLite_Sequential_Notification	136.5 ns	0.48 ns	0.31 ns	0.68	0.01	0.0057	96 B	0.16
MediatorLite_Parallel_Notification	141.3 ns	0.43 ns	0.29 ns	0.71	0.01	0.0057	96 B	0.16

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Key Takeaways

MediatorLite consistently allocates less memory across every scenario. The notification sequential mode is especially notable — near-identical latency to MediatR but less than half the allocations. The ValueTask-based pipeline and source-generated dispatch path trade raw per-call speed for a predictable, low-allocation footprint.

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Running Benchmarks Locally

cd tests/MediatorLite.Benchmarks
dotnet run --configuration Release -- --filter '*' --exporters json markdown --memory

Results are written to BenchmarkDotNet.Artifacts/results/.

REST API Benchmarks (Production-Like)

The repository also includes a REST API benchmark project at tests/MediatorLite.RestApiBenchmarks. This suite compares MediatorLite and MediatR in end-to-end API scenarios backed by SQLite:

• In-process transport (TestServer) and real localhost transport (Kestrel)
• Read-heavy and write-heavy API operations
• Concurrency scenarios with multiple in-flight requests

Run read/write benchmarks:

dotnet run -c Release --project tests/MediatorLite.RestApiBenchmarks -- --filter '*RestApiReadWriteBenchmarks*'

Run concurrency benchmarks:

dotnet run -c Release --project tests/MediatorLite.RestApiBenchmarks -- --filter '*RestApiConcurrencyBenchmarks*'