What causes EF insert to be much slower than plain ADO.NET?

Question

I have to record web service calling in database. At beginning, I used code first EF to define Entity class and generate database script. The database part is very simple, just only one table. There is a primary key: Id, and other columns are string ,datetime and float. 16 columns totally.

Then I ran the performance analysis of VS2012. the report shows RecordUsageEF consume half time of whole calling, that is ridiculous. I tried MergeOption.NoTracking option and Pre-Generate Views(How to: Pre-Generate Views to Improve Query Performance). But they didn't help to much.

Then I tried Ado.net. I put sql script in source code just for testing. calling 2 methods together to compare the performance.

    public static void RecordUsage(HttpContext httpContext, XmlWDCRecipe processedRecipe, string orgRecipe, string userName, ActionEnum action, bool trueview, string pageId)
    {                                                                                               
        RecordUsageEF(httpContext, processedRecipe, orgRecipe, userName, action, trueview, pageId);
        RecordUsageADO(httpContext, processedRecipe, orgRecipe, userName, action, trueview, pageId);
    }

The result surprised me:

Updated using static EF context improves some:

Inside RecordUsageEF:

Updated Inside RecordUsageEF -- static context

Updated Just realized the default Performance is CPU sampling, here is the result when choosing Instrumentation

It is not so bad but if CPU is bottle neck for a website/webservice. EF looks not good choice.

I checked the script generated by EF in sql profiler. it is a very simple insert sql statement and it ran faster then Ado.net one.

Is there something I missed for EF? I can't use EF if it in this level of performance.

Here is source code.
EF version:

public static readonly LogContainer container = new LogContainer();

private static void RecordUsageEF(HttpContext httpContext, XmlWDCRecipe processedRecipe, string orgRecipe, string userName, ActionEnum action, bool trueview, string pageId)
    {
        {
            container.Usages.MergeOption = System.Data.Objects.MergeOption.NoTracking;
            using (LookupService ls = new LookupService(httpContext.Server.MapPath(geoDBLocation), LookupService.GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE))
            {
                //get country of the ip address
                Location location = s.getLocation(httpContext.Request.UserHostAddress);


                Usage usage = new Usage()
                {
                    Brand = brand,
                    Action = action.ToString(),
                    ExecuteDate = DateTime.Now,
                    OutputFormat = trueview ? Path.GetExtension(processedRecipe.Output.trueview_file) : Path.GetExtension(processedRecipe.Output.design_file),
                    Recipe = orgRecipe,
                    SessionId = pageId,
                    Username = userName,
                    ClientIP = httpContext.Request.UserHostAddress,
                    ClientCountry = location == null ? null : location.countryName,
                    ClientState = location == null ? null : location.regionName,
                    ClientCity = location == null ? null : location.city,
                    ClientPostcode = location == null ? null : location.postalCode,
                    ClientLatitude = location == null ? null : (double?)location.latitude,
                    ClientLongitude = location == null ? null : (double?)location.longitude,
                    UserAgent = httpContext.Request.UserAgent
                };

                //container.AddToUsages(usage);
                container.Usages.AddObject(usage);                   
                container.SaveChanges(System.Data.Objects.SaveOptions.None);
            }
        }     
    }

EF setting is default:

Ado.net version:

    private static void RecordUsageADO(HttpContext httpContext, XmlWDCRecipe processedRecipe, string orgRecipe, string userName, ActionEnum action, bool trueview, string pageId)
    {
        using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection("data source=pgo_swsvr;initial catalog=OESDWebSizer;user id=sa;password=sa;MultipleActiveResultSets=True;"))
        {

            using (LookupService ls = new LookupService(httpContext.Server.MapPath(geoDBLocation), LookupService.GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE))
            {
                //get country of the ip address
                //test using "203.110.131.5"  "58.63.236.236"
                //httpContext.Request.UserHostAddress
                Location location = ls.getLocation(httpContext.Request.UserHostAddress);


                SqlCommand command = new SqlCommand();
                conn.Open();
                command.Connection = conn;
                command.CommandType = System.Data.CommandType.Text;
                command.CommandText = @"insert into Usages ([Brand],[Username],[SessionId],[Action],[Recipe],[ExecuteDate]
                                       ,[OutputFormat],[ClientIP],[ClientCountry],[ClientState],[ClientCity],[ClientPostcode]
                                       ,[ClientLatitude],[ClientLongitude],[UserAgent])
                                        Values ('" + brand + "'," 
                                        + (string.IsNullOrEmpty(userName) ? "NULL" : "'" + userName + "'") + ", '" + pageId + "', '" + action.ToString() + "', '" + orgRecipe + "', '" + DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyyMMdd") + "', '"
                                        + (trueview ? Path.GetExtension(processedRecipe.Output.trueview_file) : Path.GetExtension(processedRecipe.Output.design_file)) + "', '"
                                        + httpContext.Request.UserHostAddress + "', '"
                                        + (location == null ? string.Empty : location.countryName) + "', '"
                                        + (location == null ? string.Empty : location.regionName) + "', '"
                                        + (location == null ? string.Empty : location.city) + "', '"
                                        + (location == null ? string.Empty : location.postalCode) + "', "
                                        + (location == null ? 0 : (double?)location.latitude) + ", "
                                        + (location == null ? 0 : (double?)location.longitude) + ", '"
                                        + httpContext.Request.UserAgent + "')";

                command.ExecuteNonQuery();

            }
        }
    }

Answer 1

Entity Framework is abstracting a lot of details as the cost of (some) CPU performance. Microsoft has an article detailing performance considerations: Performance Considerations (Entity Framework)

Answer 2

I'm mostly familiar with the code-first way of doing things, but if your container object is a DbContext, the following should increase insert performance dramatically:

container.Configuration.AutoDetectChangesEnabled = false;
container.Configuration.ValidateOnSaveEnabled = false;