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

StringBuilder is probably preferable. The reason is that it allocates more space than currently needed (you set the number of characters) to leave room for future appends. Then those future appends that fit in the current buffer don't require any memory allocation or garbage collection, which can be expensive. In general, I use StringBuilder for complex string concatentation or multiple formatting, then convert to a normal String when the data is complete, and I want an immutable object again.

使用字符串进行连接会导致运行时复杂度达到O(n^2)的量级。

如果使用StringBuilder，需要复制的内存就会少得多。使用StringBuilder(int capacity)，如果您可以估计最终字符串的大小，则可以提高性能。即使不精确，也可能只需要将StringBuilder的容量增加几倍，这也有助于提高性能。

一个简单的例子来演示使用String连接和StringBuilder在速度上的差异:

System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch time = new Stopwatch();
string test = string.Empty;
time.Start();
for (int i = 0; i < 100000; i++)
{
    test += i;
}
time.Stop();
System.Console.WriteLine("Using String concatenation: " + time.ElapsedMilliseconds + " milliseconds");

结果:

使用字符串串联:15423毫秒

StringBuilder test1 = new StringBuilder();
time.Reset();
time.Start();
for (int i = 0; i < 100000; i++)
{
    test1.Append(i);
}
time.Stop();
System.Console.WriteLine("Using StringBuilder: " + time.ElapsedMilliseconds + " milliseconds");

结果:

使用StringBuilder: 10毫秒

结果，第一次迭代花费了15423毫秒，而使用StringBuilder的第二次迭代花费了10毫秒。

在我看来，使用StringBuilder更快，快得多。

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)。

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。