The performance of a concatenation operation for a String or StringBuilder object depends on how often a memory allocation occurs. A String concatenation operation always allocates memory, whereas a StringBuilder concatenation operation only allocates memory if the StringBuilder object buffer is too small to accommodate the new data. Consequently, the String class is preferable for a concatenation operation if a fixed number of String objects are concatenated. In that case, the individual concatenation operations might even be combined into a single operation by the compiler. A StringBuilder object is preferable for a concatenation operation if an arbitrary number of strings are concatenated; for example, if a loop concatenates a random number of strings of user input.

来源:MSDN

从内存的角度来看，StringBuilder的性能会更好。至于处理，执行时间的差异可以忽略不计。

这个基准测试表明，当组合3个或更少字符串时，常规连接更快。

http://www.chinhdo.com/20070224/stringbuilder-is-not-always-faster/

StringBuilder可以在内存使用方面做出非常显著的改进，特别是在将500个字符串加在一起的情况下。

考虑下面的例子:

string buffer = "The numbers are: ";
for( int i = 0; i < 5; i++)
{
    buffer += i.ToString();
}
return buffer;

内存中发生了什么?创建以下字符串:

1 - "The numbers are: "
2 - "0"
3 - "The numbers are: 0"
4 - "1"
5 - "The numbers are: 01"
6 - "2"
7 - "The numbers are: 012"
8 - "3"
9 - "The numbers are: 0123"
10 - "4"
11 - "The numbers are: 01234"
12 - "5"
13 - "The numbers are: 012345"

通过将这5个数字加到字符串的末尾，我们创建了13个字符串对象!其中12个是无用的!哇!

StringBuilder fixes this problem. It is not a "mutable string" as we often hear (all strings in .NET are immutable). It works by keeping an internal buffer, an array of char. Calling Append() or AppendLine() adds the string to the empty space at the end of the char array; if the array is too small, it creates a new, larger array, and copies the buffer there. So in the example above, StringBuilder might only need a single array to contain all 5 additions to the string-- depending on the size of its buffer. You can tell StringBuilder how big its buffer should be in the constructor.

StringBuilder更适合从许多非常量值构建字符串。

If you're building up a string from a lot of constant values, such as multiple lines of values in an HTML or XML document or other chunks of text, you can get away with just appending to the same string, because almost all compilers do "constant folding", a process of reducing the parse tree when you have a bunch of constant manipulation (it's also used when you write something like int minutesPerYear = 24 * 365 * 60). And for simple cases with non-constant values appended to each other, the .NET compiler will reduce your code to something similar to what StringBuilder does.

但是当你的append不能被编译器简化为更简单的东西时，你将需要一个StringBuilder。正如fizch所指出的，这更有可能发生在循环内部。

我已经看到，在StringBuilder的实例上使用EnsureCapacity(int capacity)方法调用，然后再将它用于任何字符串存储，可以显著提高性能。我通常在实例化后的代码行中调用它。它的效果和你这样实例化StringBuilder是一样的:

var sb = new StringBuilder(int capacity);

该调用会提前分配所需的内存，从而在多个Append()操作期间减少内存分配。您必须对需要多少内存做出有根据的猜测，但对于大多数应用程序来说，这应该不会太难。我通常会在内存过多的情况下犯错(我们说的是1k左右)。

以“微优化剧场的悲剧”为例。