[C#] Game runs oddly slow

BRIEF SUMMARY

I wrote a single-thread physics engine in C# and compiled it into a DLL.

The engine and my Unity game by themselves can be run on a single core at the same time (I tried to put both processes' affinity to the same core and they run without any problem), but when I call my engine from within a MonoBehavior things get super slow.

Can anyone help?

DETAILS

I have some code which is quite "fast" when outside Unity, but gets very slow if I use it inside a game.

I am working on a physics engine in C#, which I developed and tested without Unity, and doesn't use any Unity type.

After I got to a milestone, since I needed to draw the scene in 3d, I decided to plug the engine into Unity. So I created a dll and a scene with an empty object (which I will call Simulator), a camera and a cube with a rigidbody. I added the following script to the Simulator:

 public class Simulation : MonoBehaviour
 {
    World world;
    void Start()
     {
         /* initialization logic, not important */
         world = new World();
     }
 
     void FixedUpdate()
     {
         world.Update(Time.deltaTime);
     }
 }

"World" is a class I imported from my dll, and world.Update(..) performs one step of update in my physics engine (which is single-threaded, if that might help). The constructor initializes a lot of objects and other things (this is just to say: it's not empty in this example).

I am not drawing the content of my engine because I wanted to test for physics performance before that.

Now the thing is this:

• Before embedding the dll in a Unity game, I put it in a test C# project (just console), and I could run the world.Update() method at 60fps taking 18% of my CPU (again, single thread). This was true only if I ran it with all the compiler optimizations (i.e. Release, not Debug profile)

• The Unity game itself consumes around 2-4% of CPU time when I don't execute the world.Update() inside it, by disabling the Simulator object

However, if I leave the Simulator enabled, the game runs SUPER slow, I'd say around 0.5 fps. And I'm not drawing anything except for a falling cube, which I already tried disabling, and I keep only to test for framerate.

I already tried switching to the Update() instead of FixedUpdate(), which made little difference, if any.

I also built the game into a release package for Windows and run it at lowest graphics possible, with the exact same result.

The DLL is pre-compiled for .NET 3.5 in Release mode, and imported into Unity as an asset.

Could anyone explain this to me? I am at a loss.

My theory is that Unity "doesn't like" a single fixed update to take almost all of a fixed frame, even though I know it takes less than 16 ms, but I can't think of a reason why that would happen (again, I can run the two codes on the same core in separate processes both at 60 fps T_T).

Also, as I said, using Update instead of FixedUpdate led to no improvement.

MY SPECS

• OS: Windows 8.1

• Processor: i5 dual-core, 2 threads per core

• Ram: 8 GB

• Graphics Card: Mobility Radeon 5470 512MB

I know it's not a monster PC, but I don't think it matters in this case.

EDIT:

I also tried compiling my engine for .NET 2.0, to check if that was the problem (I was compiling for .NET 3.5), but nothing changed. If I use a stopwatch to measure the time it takes to complete a world.Update(), I get 10 ms in a test console project (on average), while with Unity it takes 18 ms.

Also, I tried to change the Time settings in Unity, trying 16, 20 and 30 ms fixed timesteps, with no luck (which is even weirder because with 30ms the world.Update() takes only half of the frame and still it doesn't go smoothly).