How to build predicates dynamically using expression trees

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I'm working at the application which finds so called execution patterns in logs recorded by IntelliTrace historical debugger. An execution pattern is a sequence of methods calls that is widely used in the application and it is a kind of automatically generated documentation. The part of the algorithm is filtering of found patterns based on criteria like the length of a pattern or the number of different methods in a pattern.

At the beginning I used only 2 criteria so it was easy to handle all possible combinations of them i.e. use the first criterion, use the second criterion, use both and used none. Then I added 3rd criterion and I thought that for 3 criteria I still don't need a generic mechanism. However, shortly it turned out that I want to handle 5 criteria what gives 32 of possible combinations. This time I did it once and for all.

I decided to use expression trees to dynamically build an expression that verifies any combination of criteria. The code is quite simple. Firstly we need an enum for all criteria.

[Flags]
public enum Crieria : byte
{
    None = 0,
    CriterionOne = 1,
    CriterionTwo = 2,
    All = CriterionOne | CriterionTwo
}

We also need a class that will represent patterns.

public class Pattern
{
    public int FieldOne { get; set; }
    public int FieldTwo { get; set; }
}

Now we can write a code that will dynamically build needed expressions. I assumed that every criterion has a corresponding static method that knows how to check if a current pattern fulfils it or not. The final expression produced by CreateExpression method will be of the following form pattern => predicate1(pattern) && predicate2(pattern) && predicate3(pattern)....

public static class FilterBuilder
{
    public static Func<Pattern, bool> CreateExpression(Crieria filteringMode)
    {
        var param = Expression.Parameter(typeof(Pattern));

        var subExpressions = new List<MethodCallExpression>();

        if ((filteringMode & Crieria.CriterionOne) != 0)
            subExpressions.Add(Expression.Call(typeof(FilterBuilder), nameof(CriterionOnePredicate), null, param));

        if ((filteringMode & Crieria.CriterionTwo) != 0)
            subExpressions.Add(Expression.Call(typeof(FilterBuilder), nameof(CriterionTwoPredicate), null, param));

        //Other criteria...

        if (subExpressions.Count == 0)
            return p => true;

        Expression finalExpression = subExpressions[0];
        for (var i = 1; i < subExpressions.Count; ++i)
            finalExpression = Expression.And(finalExpression, subExpressions[i]);

        return Expression.Lambda<Func<Pattern, bool>>(finalExpression, param).Compile();
    }

    public static bool CriterionOnePredicate(Pattern p)
    {
        return p.FieldOne > 0;
    }

    public static bool CriterionTwoPredicate(Pattern p)
    {
        return p.FieldTwo < 0;
    }
}

The code can be made even more generic but I'll leave it as an exercise. When I finished this code I started to worry about performance. It is critical for me because my application needs to process large amount of patterns efficiently. I made the following simple test in which dynamically generated and static functions are executed 1 million times.

var iterations = 1000000;

var predicate = FilterBuilder.CreateExpression(Crieria.All);
MeasureIt<Pattern>((p) => predicate(p), new Pattern(), iterations);

predicate = FilterBuilder.CreateExpression(Crieria.CriterionOne);
MeasureIt<Pattern>((p) => predicate(p), new Pattern(), iterations);

MeasureIt<Pattern>((p) =>
{
   FilterBuilder.CriterionOnePredicate(p);
   FilterBuilder.CriterionTwoPredicate(p);
}, new Pattern(), iterations );

MeasureIt<Pattern>((p) => FilterBuilder.CriterionOnePredicate(p), new Pattern(), iterations);

In order to measure time of calculations I used MeasureIt method from my earlier post and I received the following results:

Total time: 54
Total time: 27
Total time: 18
Total time: 12

Dynamically generated predicates are 2-3 times slower than static ones. However, we are still talking here about dozens of milliseconds in order to make 1 million calls. For me it is acceptable.