Is it costly to get a singleton instance each frame ?

Question

Consider this :

 private void Update()
     {
         UpdateUI();
 
         PlayerInfo.GetInstance().planetsVisited = PlayerInfo.GetInstance().score / planetRate;
 
     }

Does the GetInstance() function do a similar thing as say GetComponent()

Is it more optimized to make a cache like private PlayerInfo m_playerInfo;

and get it at Start() ?

Answer 1

Answer by Namey5 · Aug 26, 2020 at 11:52 AM

This depends on how the singleton is setup and what GetInstance() does. For the majority of things though, you should be caching the instance;

 private Singleton m_Instance;
 public Singleton Instance => m_Instance;
 
 private void OnEnable ()
 {
     if (m_Instance && m_Instance != this)
     {
         enabled = false;
         return;
     }
 
     m_Instance = this;
 }
 
 private void OnDisable ()
 {
     if (m_Instance == this)
         m_Instance = null;
 }

Using a property and member variable like this provides access safety and allows you to still publicly access the instance as though it were a variable.

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Is it costly to get a singleton instance each frame ?

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