Is there any way to improve the performance of parsing/de-serializing DateTime strings?
If you know the exact format used for DateTime serialization, always specify it for parsing. Use DateTime.ParseExact(). Otherwise, the DateTime parser will sequentially try to apply a variety of culture-specific formats trying to make sense of your string, as it doesn’t have any hints about which format was used. The same practice can be applied to a numeric parsing, which is not as slow as DateTime parsing, but still can benefit from specifying a particular numeric format, if you’re not using the default format.
