.net - Benchmarking small code samples in C#, can this implementation be improved?

Question

Quite often on SO I find myself benchmarking small chunks of code to see which implemnetation is fastest.

Quite often I see comments that benchmarking code does not take into account jitting or the garbage collector.

I have the following simple benchmarking function which I have slowly evolved:

  static void Profile(string description, int iterations, Action func) {
        // warm up 
        func();
        // clean up
        GC.Collect();

        var watch = new Stopwatch();
        watch.Start();
        for (int i = 0; i < iterations; i++) {
            func();
        }
        watch.Stop();
        Console.Write(description);
        Console.WriteLine(" Time Elapsed {0} ms", watch.ElapsedMilliseconds);
    }

Usage:

Profile("a descriptions", how_many_iterations_to_run, () =>
{
   // ... code being profiled
});

Does this implementation have any flaws? Is it good enough to show that implementaion X is faster than implementation Y over Z iterations? Can you think of any ways you would improve this?

EDIT Its pretty clear that a time based approach (as opposed to iterations), is preferred, does anyone have any implementations where the time checks do not impact performance?

Answer 1

Here is the modified function: as recommended by the community, feel free to amend this its a community wiki.

static double Profile(string description, int iterations, Action func) {
    //Run at highest priority to minimize fluctuations caused by other processes/threads
    Process.GetCurrentProcess().PriorityClass = ProcessPriorityClass.High;
    Thread.CurrentThread.Priority = ThreadPriority.Highest;

    // warm up 
    func();

    var watch = new Stopwatch(); 

    // clean up
    GC.Collect();
    GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers();
    GC.Collect();

    watch.Start();
    for (int i = 0; i < iterations; i++) {
        func();
    }
    watch.Stop();
    Console.Write(description);
    Console.WriteLine(" Time Elapsed {0} ms", watch.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds);
    return watch.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds;
}

Make sure you compile in Release with optimizations enabled, and run the tests outside of Visual Studio. This last part is important because the JIT stints its optimizations with a debugger attached, even in Release mode.