title: Performance gain of marking class methods as static
body: <p>I am using FxCop to look for improvements on our application.  One of the rules we are often breaking is "Mark members as static" which is marked as a performance rule.</p>
  
  <p>Certainly we have a lot of class methods that do not action on any of the class members, which could be marked as static, but is there really a performance gain to this?</p>
  
  <p>My understanding is that static will be intantiated once at execution time.  If the method is never invoked that it would have been a waste.  If the method is invoked multiple times than there might be a small benefit.</p>
  
  <p>With variables there are obvious implications as to whether or not they are marked static, and it is critical to the operation of your application how they are defined.  For methods though I don't believe there is any functional affect on whether or not they are marked static if they do not reference any instance variables or methods.</p>
  
  <p>Am I missing the point here?  Is the standard to mark all of these methods as static?</p>